Zoli

fathers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was in her early twenties, not beautiful, or not traditional y so anyway, but the sort of woman who stal ed the breath. She held herself at the door nervously, as if she were a bowl of water that would not be al owed to spil . Her skin was dark and her eyes were as black as any I'd ever seen.

She wore a man's dark overcoat, but beneath it a wide skirt with a tripled-over hem: it appeared she had patched two or three skirts together and rol ed the hems over each other. Her hair was tied back beneath a kerchief, and two thick plaits hung down either side of her face. She wore no earrings, no bracelets, no jangling necklaces. I rose from under the covers and slipped on my wet socks.

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

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

“Comrade,” she said, nodding at me.

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

The afternoon returns to me now as a step back into what we al once believed: revolution, equality, poetry. We pul ed up chairs to the table and sat for hours, the clock ticking away. Zoli kept her head slightly bent, her glass untouched in front of her. She rattled off a few verses of the older songs. The words were in Slovak, but there was a touch of wildness to them: she wasn't used to speaking them aloud, she ‘d always sung them.

Her style was to quietly build layer upon layer until, by the end, the songs became sad and declamatory, tales of bitterness and treachery, the verses repeated over and over, like the fal ing and layering of so many leaves. When she was finished, Zoli locked her knuckles and stared straight ahead.

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

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

“Do they get out?”

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

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

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

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

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