Zoli

Paris
2003

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

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

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

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

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

The car jolts forward and merges into traffic, swerves around a pothole. Zoli puts her hands against the dashboard to brace herself. The streets begin to branch and widen and clear. Out the window she watches the quick blip of traffic lights and the flash of billboards. I have arrived in Paris so many times, she thinks, and none of them ever like this. They speed through the yellow of a traffic light and down a long avenue shaded by half-grown trees. “We'll show you around later, Mamma,” says Francesca, “but let's go home first. We've a nice lunch ready, wait until you see how many cheeses!” It is a thing her daughter seems to have invented for her, that she is a lover of cheese, and she wants to say, That's your father, not me. Zoli puts her hand on Henri's forearm, asks him if he likes cheese, and he finds it funny, for whatever reason, she is not entirely sure, and he slaps the steering wheel as he turns a sharp corner.

They slow down, past kiosks and storefronts strange with foreign script. A number of Arab women in dark headscarves emerge from a shop, only their eyes apparent. Further up the street, a black man wheels a trolley of jackets across the road. Zoli turns to watch. “So many people,” she says. “I never expected it to be like this.” Her daughter unbuckles her backseat seat belt so she can whisper: “I'm so glad you're here, Mamma, I can hardly believe it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I can't believe it,” says Francesca.

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

“Want to bet?”

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

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

“Come in, Mamma, come in!”

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

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

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

“You must be tired, Mamma?”

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

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

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

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

“I wouldn't even feel them.”

She wakes to darkness, disoriented a moment. A harsh whispering issues from the kitchen, the voices low and urgent. She lies and listens, hoping they will quieten, but Henri curses, and then she hears the slamming of a door, the slide of grooves in a kitchen cupboard, a rattling of cups. Zoli looks around the room, surrounded by the possessions of others, cosmetics on the table, photographs in frames, a row of men's shirts in the cupboard. In her mind she goes through the three rooms of her own millhouse, how the four doors creak, how the curtains jangle on the rings, how the stove leaks a little light, how the lantern nickers. Curious to have taken a train here and arrived so quickly, somewhere so unfamiliar, as if the journey has failed her by such ease. She lies back down on the bed. A surprising stillness to the room-no sounds of traffic, or children playing outside, or neighbors with their radios.

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

“Oh,” says Zoli.

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

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

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

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

Her daughter hitches the dress at the shoulders.

“Are you all right, Mamma?”

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

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

“We should take the elevator.”

“No, chonorroeja, we'll walk down.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dessert arrives and the taste of coffee fills her with sadness.

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

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

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

“What's the magnet for?”

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

Her daughter begins chatting rapid-fire into the phone. There is, it seems, a seating issue at the conference and some rooms have been overbooked. Francesca clicks down the phone and sighs. In the kitchen she opens a can of coffee beans, grinds them, fills a contraption with water. So much white machinery, thinks Zoli. She can feel a slight tension between her and her daughter, this is not what she wants, she will not embrace it, conference or not, and she asks Francesca how she slept and she says, “Oh fine,” and then Zoli asks her in Romani. It is the first time they have used the language, it seems to stun the air between them, and Francesca leans forward and says: “Mamma, I really wish that you would speak for us, I really wish you would.”

“What is there for me to speak of?”

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

“Not for me, chonorroeja.”

“It would be good for so many people.”

“They said that fifty years ago.”

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

“And what do I care for Americans? ”

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

“This thing makes good coffee?”

“Please, Mamma.”

“I cannot do it, my heart's love.”

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

“In the end, it won't matter.”

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

“Have you told anyone about the poems?”

No.

“Promise? ”

Mamma, I promise. Please.”

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

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

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

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

“You know that no matter what, I am still polluted.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Mamma.”

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

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

“Older than a rock,” Zoli says.

“Prettier though.”

“This young man of yours…”

“Henri.”

“Should I get the linden blossoms ready?”

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

“Clack your fingers?”

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

They sit in the sunshine awhile, happy, silent, then walk back arm-in-arm to Francesca's car, a beetle-shaped thing, bright purple. Zoli slides in the front seat, surprised, but gladdened, by the disorder. There are cups on the floor, papers, clothing, and an ashtray brimming with cigarette ends. It thrills her, the complicated promise of a life so different. On the floor, at Zoli's feet, she sees one of the colored fliers for the conference. She studies it as the car lurches forward, trying hard to figure out the wording. Finally her daughter says, as she shifts the gearstick: “From Wheel to Parliament: Romani Memory and Imagination.”

“A mouthful,” says Zoli.

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

“Yes, a good one. I like it.”

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

In the flier there are photographs of speakers, one a Czech woman with high cheekbones and dark eyes. The thought of it gaffs Zoli a moment-a Czech professor, a Rom-but she does not let on, she closes the flier, clenches at a bump in the road, and says: “I can't wait.”

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

“I'm not made for galas, Franca.”

“One time you were.”

“I was once, yes, one time.”

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

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

“This is where you work?”

“We've a clinic out here.”

“These people are poor,” says Zoli.

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

“Our own?”

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

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

“Glue,” says Francesca.

“What?”

“He's sniffing glue.”

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

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

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

“But how do we get out?” asks Zoli.

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

“Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

“This is my cubicle,” says Francesca.

Zoli looks up to see photographs of herself and Enrico, standing in the valley on a summer afternoon. She reaches out to touch his face, dark with sun. There is also one of Francesca as a child of eight, a kerchief on her hair, standing outside the millhouse, the turn of the wheel slightly blurred. Did we really live this way? she wonders. She wants to ask the question aloud, but nothing comes, and then she snaps herself back, pinches her wrist, and remarks how nice the office is, though clearly it is a temporary structure, cramped, leaky, tight.

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

“You're pale,” Francesca says again.

“It's just a little hot in here.”

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

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

“No, no, I'm fine.”

“I'll just make some phone calls.”

“You go ahead, chonorroeja.”

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

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

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

“Drive me around, Franca,” she says.

“But you're tired.”

“Please, I want to drive around.”

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

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

“Get in, Mamma.”

“Why?”

“Get in! Please.”

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

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

“I want to see it.”

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

“And where are ours? ”

“Ours?” Yes, ours.

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

“Block eight, then.”

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

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

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

“How many live here, Franca?”

“A couple of hundred.”

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

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

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“It's okay, love.”

“We try to help as much as possible.”

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

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

They pass in a raw, cold silence.

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

“Who are all these people tonight?”

“Mamma?”

“At the conference, who are they?”

“Academics,” says Francesca. “Social scientists. There are Romani writers now, Mamma. Some poets. One is coming all the way from Croatia. There are some brilliant people about these days, Mamma. The Croatian's a poet. There's a man from the University of-”

“That's nice.”

“Mamma, are you okay?”

“Did you see that wheelbarrow?”

“Mamma?”

“Someone should turn it the right way up.”

“We'll be home soon, don't worry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmmr?”

“Just joking.”

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

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

“Well, I think I did just fine.”

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

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

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

Zoli closes her eyes and allows the water to fall along her body.

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

“Coast is clear, Mamma.”

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

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

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

“I feel a bit dizzy.”

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

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

“And die of boredom? Come on, Mamma!”

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

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

“Thank you,” says Zoli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Across the hallway she sees Henri pumping hands with a tall man in a banded white hat.

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

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

“Mamma?”

“Yes, yes, I'm fine.”

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

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

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

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

Onstage the Scottish musicians begin to break the skin of the evening and the music fills the room-mandolin, guitar, fiddle. Laughter sounds out all around and movement blurs the hall. Waiters. Hotel staff. Tall men with leather patches on their sleeves.

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

Go, violin, she thinks, go.

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

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

The air around her suddenly compresses.

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

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

“Are you Zoli Novotna?”

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

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

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

“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”

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

“It's a pleasure,” he says.

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

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

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

“Me?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Swann?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Stephen Swann?”

“Yes, of course,” he says.

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

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

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

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

“Ms. Novotna?” he says.

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

Zoli thinks a moment that she must be wrong, that her mind has slipped an instant, that she has found his face in someone else, that the mention of his name has brought his face to another, that the dizziness has misled her, that time has just shifted and fractured and landed in shards. The man-is it Swann?- looks directly across at her, one hand down by his side, a wooden cane in the other. He is dressed in a fine gray suit. His hair, or what remains of it, is gray. A shiny bald pate in the middle. Heavy lids frame his eyes. His face is thin, his brow furrowed. He does not move. Zoli looks about her for some escape. Her breath sounds to her like someone drowning. She casts about for her daughter again, grasps the back of the empty chair. Go away, she thinks. Please go away. Disappear. The music from the stage is loud, powerful, and the extended pull of a bow across a violin makes her shiver.

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

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

“Later perhaps?”

“Yes, yes, later.”

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

“All of us, we'll get together,” says the journalist.

“Of course, yes.”

“We'll meet here?”

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

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

“I know who you are,” she says.

“Zoli, can we sit?”

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

“No,” she says.

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

“I want to say something. Please.”

“I know what you want to say.”

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

“I know what you thought.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mamma?”

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

“Of course, Mamma. Why?”

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

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, precious heart.”

“Who was that man you were talking to?”

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

“Oh, my God.”

“I just need some money for a taxi.”

“What did you say to him?”

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

“What's he doing here?”

“I don't know. Do you know?”

“Why would I know, Mamma?”

“Tell me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just take me out to the taxi.”

“I'll go with you.”

“No. I want to sit alone.”

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

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

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

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

For a long time she forgets to push the button.

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

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

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

“Mamma.”

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

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

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“How long have you been there?”

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

“Who's there? Who's that? Outside?”

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

“Who?” says Zoli.

“Henri.”

“I mean who's with him?”

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

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

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

“You were sleeping with Daddy?”

“Yes, how silly is that?”

“Just silly enough.”

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

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

“Did you talk to him? Swann?”

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

“Did he say what he was sorry for?”

“For everything, Mamma.”

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

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

“Come here beside me.”

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

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“I had no idea.”

“What else did he say?”

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

“What's he doing here?”

“He said he likes to follow things. To keep in touch. That it was a hobby. He still uses the word Gypsy. Goes to a lot of conferences and things. The festival down there in Santa Maria. All over the place. He says he owns a wine shop.”

“A wine shop?”

“In Manchester.”

“Nobody lives where they grew up anymore.”

“What's that?”

“Just something he said to me once.”

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

“He lives alone?”

“I don't know.”

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

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

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

“More of his horseshit.”

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

“Did he say anything about Conka?”

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

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

“And the other man, the journalist?”

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

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

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him I've gone somewhere.”

“You're going home, aren't you?”

“Of course I am.”

“What will I tell him?”

“Tell him that nothing is ever arrived at.”

“What?”

“Tell him that nothing is ever fully understood, that's what I'd like to say.”

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

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

“Tell me,” says Zoli.

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

“Yes…?”

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

“That was his question?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm happy there,” says Zoli.

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

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

“Get dressed,” says Zoli.

“Mamma?”

“Let's get dressed.”

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

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

“I don t care.”

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

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

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

“What happened to the music?” says Zoli.

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

“Go on,” she says. “Play.”

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

She begins.