my back, fil ed my glass, heaped more food on my plate. I washed the hedgehog down with a bottle of fruit wine, then tried to share the bottle with the others, but they turned away.
“Don't even ask,” said Stransky. “They're just not going to drink from your swish.”
“Why not?”
“Learn silence, son, it'l keep you alive.”
Stransky sat down by the fire to sing an old bal ad he'd learned in the hil s. The wind blew, stirring the ash. The Gypsy men nodded and listened seriously, then brought out their fiddles and giant harps. The night tore open. A child climbed on my shoulders and began to shine Stransky's balding head with her bare foot. After a second bottle, it didn't seem to me that my corners were sticking out quite so much anymore—I opened the neck of my shirt and whispered to Stransky that I'd take whatever was to come.
In the early evening, crowds of Gypsies started to arrive from the countryside. They packed into a large white tent where a row of candles lit a makeshift stage. The benches were made from fal en logs. The singers began with raucous bal ads, gamblingsongs, weddingsongs, lovesongs, eveningsongs.
When Zoli walked in, she wore a long multipatterned dress with flared sleeves. Tiny beads were sewn into the dress front, and an anthracite necklace lay at the long curve of her throat. At first she was just another one of the singers. Her body was held straight and her head almost motionless, al the movement in her shoulders, arms, hands. It wasn't until later, when the night had a coating of drunkenness and the darkness had fal en, that she began to sing on her own. No harp, no violin. Raw. Sad. An old song, long and rambling, nostalgic. The firelight flickered on her face, her eyes closed, lids blue-veined, half a smile on her lips. It was not just her voice—it was what she sang that rattled us. She had made up the song herself, a story with place names, Czech and Polish and Slovak, dates and times too. Hodonin. Lety. Brno. 1943. The Black Legion. Chimneys. The carved gateposts. The charnel houses. The bone fields.
“I told you, son,” said Stransky.
When Zoli finished, the tent fel silent: only the sound of the breeze through the trees outside, ancient, unpackaged. She stepped across to a wreck of an old man—the sort of creature who could have lived shabby and mumbling in a shoebox room somewhere. He wore a half-shirt, the sort favored by musicians, with no cloth at the back. When he stretched his arms towards her, his naked skin showed. She kissed him gently on the head, then sat down with him while he smoked a pipe.
“Her husband,” whispered Stransky.
I sat back on the log.
“Careful, Swann, your mouth's open again.”
Zoli leaned in to the older man. He looked as if he had been tal and broad-shouldered once and he stil annexed that space, though he was clearly sick. Later in the evening, he coaxed sounds from a fiddle that I'd never heard before—fast, wild, screeching. He was given an extended round of applause and Zoli supported his elbow, left the tent with him. She did not come back, but the night started up again, raucous and pure. My shirt was open to the bel y button. I hardly knew what to think. Someone threw a bottle of slivovitz at me—I unscrewed the lid and drank.
In the early morning, Stransky and I stumbled towards the motorbike. The seat, the blinkers, and the handlebar grips had disappeared. Stransky chuckled and said it was not the first time he'd had unreliable Czech machinery between his legs. We climbed on, tamped our jackets down for a seat, and made our way back towards Bratislava. We approached the city, the tal brickwork adorned with arches and lintels. Rows of pigeons dozed on high ledges. Wreathed dates commemorated memory in stone. It was an old city, somewhat Hungarian, somewhat German, but on that day it felt newly and whol y Soviet. Crews were working on the bridge and, beyond that, towers and factories were going up.
Stransky's wife was waiting for us in the courtyard of his apartment block. He kissed her, skipped up the stairs, and immediately went inside to transcribe the tapes. He placed the recorder on the top of her latest cartoon. She took the drawing and smoothed it out.
“It's a Hungarian name,” Elena said as she listened. “Zoltan. I wonder where she got it.”
“Who knows, but it's quite a song, isn't it?”
“Maybe she got someone to write it for her.”
“I don't think so.”
Stransky unjammed the play lever on the recorder.
“It's naive,” said Elena. “Your mother cries, your father plays the violin. But there's a quiver to it, isn't there? And, tel me this, is she beautiful?”
“She's more beautiful than she's not,” he said.
Elena cracked her husband's knuckles with a rol ed-up newspaper. She stood, her hair ful of colored pencils, and went off to bed. Stransky winked and said he would join her shortly, but he fel asleep at the table, bent over the transcribed pages.
I found Zoli again, the fol owing week, on the steps of the Musicians Union, where she stood with her hands outstretched, fingers apart.
A crowd of Gypsies had gathered together in front of the union. There'd been a new decree that al musicians had to have licenses, but to have a license they had to be able to fil out a form, and none of the Gypsies, except Zoli, were able to write fluently. They carried violins, violas, oboes, guitars, even one giant harp. Vashengo wore a black jacket with red bicycle reflectors as cufflinks. When he moved his arms, his wrists caught the sunlight. He was trying, it seemed, with Zoli's help, to calm the crowd. A smal battalion of troopers stood at the other end of the street, slapping truncheons against their thighs. Moments later a loudspeaker was passed out of the window of the union and the crowd hushed. Vashengo spoke in Romani at first—it was as if he had laid a blanket underneath the crowd. He commanded a further silence and spoke in Slovak, said it was a new time in history, that we were al coming out of a long oblivion, carrying a red flag. He would speak with the leaders of the union. Be patient, he said.
There'd be licenses for al . He pointed at Zoli and said she would help them fil out the required forms. She lowered her head and the crowd cheered. The troopers down the street dropped their truncheons and the officials from the Musicians Union came out onto the steps. A smal boy came pushing past me, laughing. He was wearing the yel ow blinker from Stransky's motorbike on a chain.
