Zoli

table.

Zoli stood in a yel ow patterned dress with dozens of tiny mirrors glinting on the bodice. She had rouged her face with riverstone.

English, they cal ed me, as if it were the only thing I couldever be. The women giggled at my accent, winding my hair around their fingers. The children sat close to me—astoundingly close— and I thought for a moment they were rifling my pockets, but they weren't, theirs was simply a different form of space. I felt myself begin to lean towards them. Only Zoli seemed to hang back—it was only later I realized she was creating a hol ow between us to protect herself. She said to me once that I had a sudden green gaze, and I thought that it could have been taken as any number of things: curiosity, confusion, desire.

I began to visit once or twice a week. Vashengo al owed me to sleep in the back of his caravan, alongside five of his nine children. The pinch of a sheet was al I had to hold on to. The knots in the wood were like eyes in the ceiling. Al the way from Liverpool to a bed where, on my twenty-fourth birthday, I rol ed across to see five smal heads of tousled hair. I tried to take the bedding outside but in truth the darkness didn't suit me, the stars were not what I was built for, so I slept at the edge of the bed, ful y clothed. In the mornings I heated a coin with a match and put the hot disc to Vashengo's window in order to make a peephole in the frost. The children joked with me— I was wifeless, white, strange, I walked funny, smel ed bad, drove a cannibalized motorbike. The youngest ones pul ed me up by the ears, and dressed me in a waistcoat and their father's old black Homburg. I stepped out to mist shoaling over the fields. Dawn lay cold and wet on the grass. I stood, embarrassed, as the kids ran around, begging me to play wheelbarrow with them. I asked Zoli if there was anywhere else to sleep. “No,” she said, “why would there be?” She smiled and lowered her head and said that I was welcome to go to the hotel twenty kilometers away, but I was hardly going to hear any Romani songs from the chambermaids.

As a singer she could have lived differently, with no scrubbing, no cooking, no time spent looking after the children, but she didn't isolate herself, she couldn't, she was in love with that bare life, it was what she knew, it fueled her. She washed clothes in the river, beat the rugs and carpets clean.

Afterwards she put playing cards in the spoke of a bicycle wheel and rode around in the mud, cal ing out to the children. Each of them she named her chonorro, her little moon. “Come here, chonor-roeja,” she cal ed. They ran behind her, blowing whistles made from the branches of ash trees.

Behind the tire factory she played games with them on what they cal ed their bouncing wal . She threw a tire over a sapling for each new child that was born, knowing that one day it would fit snug and tight.

Zoli was already wel known amongst her people, settled and nomadic alike. She touched some old chord of tenderness in them. They would walk twenty kilometers just to hear her sing. I had no il usions that I'd ever belong, but there was the odd quiet moment when I sat with her, our backs against a wheelbase, a short span of recited song before Petr or the children interrupted us. When I cut brown bread don't look at me angrily, don't look at me angrily because I'm not going to eat it. At first she said that the writing was just a pastime—the songs were what mattered, the old bal ads that had been around for decades, and she was only shaping the music so they'd be passed along to others. She was surprised to find new words at her fingertips, and when whole new songs began to emerge, she thought they must have existed before, that they had come to her from somewhere ancient. Zoli had no inkling that anyone other than the Gypsies would want to listen to her, and the notion that her words might go out on the radio, or into a book, terrified her at first.

Before their performances, she and Conka sat on the steps of her caravan as they aligned their voices. They wanted to get within a blade of grass of each other. Conka was a ful redhead, blue-eyed, and she wore coins, glass beads, and pottery shards woven in a necklace strand. Her husband, Fyodor, stared me down. He didn't like the idea of his wife being recorded. I feigned bustle when real y al I was waiting for was Zoli's voice to pul through, with her own songs, the new ones, those she had made up herself.

One spring afternoon, near a remote forest, Zoli walked out to the edge of a lake and undertook a ceremony for her dead parents, brother, and sisters, floating candles out on the water. Three Hlinka guards had final y been charged with their murders and had received life sentences. There was no celebration among the Gypsies—they didn't seem to enjoy the revenge— but the whole kumpanija accompanied Zoli to the lakeside, and they stood back to al ow her silence while she sang an old song about wind in a chimney turning back at the last moment, never reaching down to disturb the ashes.

At the lake edge I trampled the reeds, fumbled with the batteries and clicked the lever on: she was beginning to stretch and move the language, and, like everyone else, I was chained to the sound of her voice.

Later I sat with Stransky while he transcribed the tapes. “Perfect,” he said as he pul ed his pencil through one of her lines. He was convinced that Zoli was creating a poetry from the roots up, but he stil wanted to put manners on it. She came into the city, alone, the railway ticket moist in her fist.

Ner- vously she twisted the hair that had fal en out from beneath her kerchief. Stransky read the poem aloud to her and she went to the window, peeled back some of the black tape from the glass.

“That last part is wrong,” she said.

“The last verse?”

“Yes. The clip.”

Stransky grinned: “The timing?”

Three times he reshuffled it before she shrugged and said: “Perhaps.” Stransky positioned the metal. She bit her lip, then took the printed sheet and pressed it against her chest.

I could feel my heart thumping in my cheap white shirt.

A week later she came back to say that the elders had accepted it and it could be published—they saw it as a nod of gratitude to Stransky for what he'd done in the war, but we were convinced it went beyond that; we were building a vanguard, there'd never been a poetry like it before, we were preserving and shaping their world while the world changed around them.

“The incredible happens,” she said when Stransky took us to a bookshop in the old town. She wandered along the rows of shelves, touching the spines of the books. “It's like not having any wal s.” For a while she stood next to me, ran her fingers ab-sentmindedly along my forearm, then looked down at her hand and quickly pul ed it away. She turned and walked the length of the shelves, said she could feel the words running like horses. It seemed raw and childish, until Stransky told me she'd possibly not been in many bookshops before. She spent hours wandering around and then sat to read a copy of Mayakovsky. It hadn't even dawned on her that she could own it. I bought it for her and she touched my forearm again and then,