outside, she hid the book in the pocket of her third skirt.
Stransky looked at us hard and askance, whispered to me: “She's got a husband, son.”
We took the train out to the countryside. The other passengers watched us: me in my overal s, Zoli in the colorful dresses that she hitched sideways when she sat down. Together we read Mayakovsky, our knees not quite touching. I recognized it as a tawdry desire, but more than anything I wanted to see her hair loosened. She couldn't do it, it was the habit of a married woman to wear her head covered, though I had begun to make sketches of her in my mind, what she might look like, how that hair would fal if unfastened, how I would take the weight of it in my fingers.
At the station she ran towards Petr who sat waiting on the horsecart, his dented hat on his knee. He looked a little confused, but she whispered in his ear. He laughed, slapped the reins, and took off.
I saw myself then at a distance, as someone else, doing things that only another person would do—I waited for them to return. The Stationmaster shrugged and hid a grin. A clock-tower chimed. I remained three hours, then walked the long country roads towards the camp with my rucksack on my shoulder. At nightfal , my feet bloodied, I reached the camp. The men were by the fire, cheering. A jar of booze was shoved my way. Petr shook my hand. “You look like you've been slapped,” he said.
Zoli had made up a song about a wandering Englishman waiting for a train station whistle and, with the violin at his shoulder, Petr played alongside her while the crowd laughed.
I grinned and thought about punching Petr, pounding him into the mud.
He walked around camp, wheezing. He seemed to carry his sickness tucked under his arm, but when he sat, the sickness spread out al around him. After a while, he didn't have the strength to leave the caravan at al . Zoli would come back in darkness, after singing, and sit at his bedside, waiting for him to fal asleep, his cough to subside.
“How young are the girls when they marry in England?” she asked. She was on the steps of her caravan, absently pleating the hem of her dress.
“Eighteen, nineteen, some not until they're twenty-five.”
“Oh,” she said, “that's quite old, isn't it?”
The truth was that I didn't real y know. I had for some years considered myself to be Czechoslovakian but, in retrospect, I was too English for that, too Irish to be ful y English, and too Slovakian to be in any way Irish. Translation had always got in the way of definition. Listening to the radio in the coalshed in Liverpool with my father, I had dreamed myself into the landscape of his country. It was not the place I had foreseen— endless mountains, rushing rivers—but it didn't matter anymore, I'd become someone new and the thought of her held me fast. Each word she came up with sent a thril along me—she cal ed me Stephen rather than Stepan, she liked the strange way it brought her teeth to her lips. She would giggle sometimes at the Englishness of what I did, or said, though it didn't seem English to me at al . I bought her a fountain pen from the market in the old town, discovered books for her to read, gave her ink, which Conka used to stain their dresses. I began to learn as much Romani as I could. She touched my arm, looked my way. I knew it. We had begun to cross that hol ow that had come between us.
A light snow fel in early September, six months after Petr died. I strayed from the camp. On a sandbar in the river were the footprints of wolves.
They plaited their way towards a final twist in the riverbank and disappeared into a light forest. She was standing by the water, listening to the smal thumps of snow from the branches. I came up behind her, put my hands over her eyes. My fingers went along her neck and my thumb lay in the hol ow of her shoulder. My mouth touched briefly against her cheek. She pul ed away. I said her name. A sharp intake of breath as she took off her red kerchief. She had, in mourning, cut her hair quite close to the scalp. It was against tradition. She turned away and walked the riverbank. I fol owed, put my hands over her eyes once more. She went up on her toes in the snow, a soft crunch. I rested my chin on her shoulder, felt the press of her back against me. My hand to her waist, she breathed again, and her kerchief was wrapped around my fist. She turned, pul ed at the neckline of my shirt, moved within the shadow of my shoulder, pushed the smal cloud of her stomach against my hip and held it there. We went to the ground, but she rol ed away. She had not, she said, seen the underside of a tree since she was a child, how strange the leaves looked from underneath. We did not make love, but in the snow she said any fool could tel what had gone on, and she stamped up and down in her shoes. She left, ful of tears. The il -fitting lid of Petr's old lighter clinked, marking the rhythm of her steps. I sat for the next five hours, terrified, but she returned, tripling her route so as not to be fol owed, bright with eagerness, and I forgot as we pressed against the cold bark of a tree. I could almost hear the wolves returning. The moles on her neck, a perfect dimple on her left breast, the arch of her clavicle. I traced my finger down the path of her body, pul ed a ring off her little finger with my teeth. I had suffered so many fantasies over the previous few months, it was terrifying to think that this was a riverbank, not some dingy al ey, where I had dreamed Zoli, afraid of nostalgia, in printing rooms, corridors, against hard machinery.
Zoli believed there was a life-spring that went down to the center of the earth and that it ran both ways but mostly it rose from the wel of her childhood. It was what she talked about, in her hard country accent, her days traveling with her grandfather, the roads they had covered together, the silences. When she talked about him she took her kerchief al the way across the bridge of her nose and covered her face. She figured her skin too dark, too black, too Gypsy to be in any way beautiful, that her lazy eye somehow marked her, but it seemed to me that for those few days that the moon was rol ing along the ground. I was quite sure that eventual y we would be caught together, that people would know, that the children would see us, or Conka would find out, or Fyodor, or Vashengo, and we were alert enough to know that the snowmelt would final y flood the bend, but it didn't matter.
She heard an owl hooting one evening, and froze in terror, covered her eyes, said something about the spirit of her grandfather returning, shamed.
“We can't do this,” she said, and she stepped off, feet snapping on the cold leaves.
The train to the city was strangely old-world, brown-paneled, the wind rattling at the broken windows.
“They'l tie your bal s around your neck and knot them like a bulb of garlic,” said Stransky.
“We haven't done anything. Besides, she wouldn't tel a soul.”
“You're a naive fool. She is too.”
“It won't happen again.”
“Don't touch her, I'm warning you. They'l pul a sheet across you. She's a Gypsy woman. She belongs to a Gypsy man.”
