Zoli (23 page)

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.

T
HE 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.