“And is that why we ‘re printing her poems?”
He pul ed up his col ar and lowered himself to his work. It was almost a relief to get out from the mil , away from Stransky and his obsessions, to get lost underneath the streetlamps of the city. He rarely cal ed me his son anymore, but I walked tal er for those few months—my chest was drawing breath from Zoli, she was fil ing me out. We published her first chapbook in the autumn of ‘53, and it was embraced by al sides, the younger poets, the academics, even the bureaucrats. She wanted it threaded, not glued, for no reason I could fathom, something to do with a horse she had once known.
Smal matter, the work was now towards a longer, more lasting series of lyrics. I sat, happy, on an upturned bucket, in the street outside my flat, watching the sun rise between the old buildings.
There exists somewhere, hidden away, a photograph of the three of us—Stransky, Zoli, and me—taken in the Park Kultury beside the Danube on a gray afternoon. The water ripples gently. Zoli wears a long, flowing skirt and a frayed bolero jacket. I wear a bright white shirt and a Basque beret, tilted at an angle. Stransky—almost ful y bald by then—wears a dark blue shirt and black tie. He has a slight stomach that Zoli used to cal his kettle.
My foot is up on a dockside bol ard. Zoli is as tal as me, while Stransky nestles between us. My arm is firmly around his shoulder. In the background a cargo ship passes with a giant sign pasted along the hul :
Even now I can step towards that photograph, walk along the edge of it, climb down into it, and recal exactly the sharp thril of being photographed with her.
“Please don't look at me,” she said at times when the spotlight caught her, but it seemed to some that Zoli had begun to develop a smal fondness for the microphone.
Once, in the vil age of Prievidza, she was taken to the Hal of Culture, which backed out onto an enormous courtyard. The yard had been ful for hours with al manner of Gypsies, waiting. The reading was given in the upstairs room where the ceiling was corniced and the rows were orderly. As the locals filed in, the Gypsies stood, bowed, and gave up their seats to the vil agers, then took a place at the back of the room. Bureaucrats sat in the front row, families of the local police took the seats behind. I couldn't quite fathom what was going on. It seemed the officials had been ordered to go along as part of the policy of embracing the Gypsies. The room fil ed and soon only a couple of Gypsy elders remained—I thought they might fight, or start an argument, but instead they wil ingly gave up their places and went out to the courtyard. “A point of pride,” said Stransky. They were amazed that any gadzo would want to come to hear one of theirs. “At the end of the day, Swann, they're just being polite.” Something in me shifted
—it had seemed to me to be part of some elaborate ritual, and I hadn't thought of such simplicity.
Zoli begged for the reading to be switched to a bigger hal , but the organizers said it was impossible, so she bowed her head and went on. She was stil not used to reading aloud but she did so that evening; she spoke of a light rain in the onset of winter, and a set of horses tied to telegraph poles, a brand-new lyric that suddenly went off-kilter and she could not haul it back. She stammered and tried to explain it, then left abruptly, tearing off one of her new earrings as she went.
Afterwards she opened up the bottom-floor windows and passed plates of food out to those who had waited in the courtyard for her. Stransky and I found her later, smoking a pipe in the blue shadows of the hal , one eye closed against the smoke, fingers trembling. There was talk that trouble had flared in the local bar.
“I want to go home,” she said. She put her head against the wal and I felt privy to her sadness. It was, of course, the oldest idea: home. To her it meant silence. I tried to take her arm but she turned away.
Zoli disappeared for four days then and I found out only later that she had been taken around by horsecart to al the settlements where she did not read for them but sang, which is what they wanted anyway—they wanted her voice, the secret of it, the one thing that was theirs.
I had printed up a poster with Stransky: it was a new take on an old slogan, and it included an approximation of Zoli's face, a drawing, not a photograph, slightly idealized, no lazy eye, just a working woman's stare and a gray tunic.
Her face was pasted up along al the pylons and telegraph poles of the countryside. Soon her tapes were being played on the radio and she was talked about in the corridors of power. She was a new sort of Czechoslovakian woman, taken out of the margins to il ustrate our steps forward under socialism. She was tel ing the story unlike anyone had told it before. Zoli was invited to the Ministry of Culture, the National Theater, the Carlton, the Socialist Academy, screenings in the Stalingrad Hotel, conferences on literature where Stransky stood up and bel owed her name into the microphone. She spoke five languages with varying degrees of fluency, and Stransky had begun to cal her a Gypsy intel ectual. A shadow crossed her face, but she didn't silence him, something in her liked the novelty.
The elders had begun to notice shifts in the outside world— the licenses came more easily, the troopers didn't seek them out to demand permits, the local butchers served them with less fuss than before. The Gypsies had even been invited to create their own chapter in the Musicians Union.
Vashengo hardly believed that he, of al people, could now be served in a tavern where years ago he was not even al owed in by the back entrance.
Sometimes he walked into the Carlton Hotel just to hear the porters cal him Comrade. He came out, slapping his cap off his knee.
One night at the dressing room in the National Theater, Zoli turned to Stransky and said she could not read aloud, she did not have the stomach for it. Her back left a trace of moisture on the leather chair. They walked out into the wings together and looked around the curtain—the theater was packed. A glint of light from a pair of opera glasses. The dimming of the chandeliers. Stransky leveled the crowd with one of her poems and then Zoli walked onstage beside him. The spotlight made her seem at ease. The crowd whispered amongst themselves. She put her lips against the microphone and the feedback squealed. She stepped to the side and read without benefit of the mike. When the crowd cheered, the Gypsies—
who had been given two rows at the back of the theater—erupted in applause. At a reception afterwards, Zoli was given a standing ovation. I watched Vashengo at the tables, fil ing his pockets ful of bread and cheese.
On nights like these, I was background music; there was no way I could get to Zoli, there was a whispering pact between us, our goodbyes were quick and fateful, yet the dul pain in my chest had disappeared by the time I woke in the morning. I had taped a photo of her in the corner of my mirror.
