When we walked beneath the trees in the Square of the Slovak National Uprising, there were always one or two people who recognized her. In the literary cafes the poets turned to watch. Politicians wanted to be seen with her. We marched on May Day, our fists high in the air. We attended conferences on Socialist theater. Across the river, beyond the bridges, we watched the swinging cranes and the towerblocks rise up in the air. We found grace in the most simple of things: a street-sweeper humming Dvorak, a date carved in a wal , the split backseam of a jacket, a slogan in a newspaper. She joined the Union of Slovak Writers and shortly afterwards, in a poem published in
I read to her from a translation of Steinbeck that I'd been working on intermittently. “I want to go to university,” she said as she tapped the spine of the book on her knee. A part of me knew it was doomed to failure. I stammered. She sat by the windowsil in silence, scraping a bit of light from the blackened glass. The next week I bartered in the university for an application form—they were hard to come by. I slipped her the application one chil y morning but heard nothing more about it, though I saw the form weeks later—it plugged a chink in the boards of her wagon where cold air was getting through.
“Oh,” she said, “I changed my mind.”
Yet the prospect of her stil kept me going. There was a chance that others would find out, that she ‘d be considered pol uted,
Whole weeks would go by when we could not touch sleeves for fear of being seen, but there was an electricity between us. Alone at the mil we sat with our backs against the folding bed that Stransky had set up on the second floor, by the Zyrkon cutting machines. She touched the whiteness of my chestbones. Ran her fingers in my hair. We had no clue where our bodies stopped and the consequences began. In the streets, we walked apart.
There were other rumblings among some of the Gypsy leaders of course—Zoli was becoming too gadzo for them, her Party card, her literary life, her trips to the cinema, the Lenin museum, the botanical gardens, the box seats she was given one night at the symphony where she took Conka, who cried.
She was, they said, trying to live her life several feet off the ground. It was stil considered beyond the realm for her to be seen carrying around books: some notions were impossible to defeat. When she was with the kumpanija she sewed pages into the lining of her coat, or deep in the pockets of her dresses. Among her favorites was an early Neruda, in Slovak, a copy of which she had bought for herself in a secondhand shop.
She moved along, lovesongs at her hip, and I learned whole poems so that I could whisper them to her if we chanced on a moment alone. In her other pockets there were volumes by Krasko,
Lorca, Whitman, Seifert, even Tatarka's new work. When she dropped her coat to the floor, in the mil , so that we could read to one another, she immediately got slimmer.
Winter arrived and the Gypsies did not travel. It was a time I could not, for the life of me, understand. The tape recorder froze. The reels cracked.
There was ice on the microphone. My shoes fil ed with frost and the blood backed away from my fingers. Zoli would not spend time with me unless others were around: we could not afford to be seen too much together.
I took the train home to my flat in Bratislava, stood under the railway loudspeakers just for the sound of things. I preferred my shelf of books to the feet of Vashengo's children stuck in my ribcage, but after a couple of days the desire to see Zoli built up again and out I went, the microphone and recorder in my rucksack. She smiled and touched my hand. A child turned the corner and she sprang away. I wandered the winter camp. Rusted scrap metal. Severed cables. Bent petrol drums. Dog bones. Punctured cans. The tongues of carriages. Whole matrices of lost things. Conka had found a scarf with patterns of roses on it. She sat, al blanketed up on the steps of her caravan, face twisted by the cold. She looked thin and bitter.
The men stood around as if waiting for what might fal from the teeth of horses. I wanted nothing more than to bring Zoli to the city, settle her down, have her write, make her mine, but it was impossible, she liked it there, she was used to it, along the riverbank, she saw the dark and light of the camp as the one same thing.
Graco, Vashengo's oldest son, pushed up against me. He was younger than me, in his late teens.
“And how's the boy, how's the boy, how is he?” At first he just threw a wild punch. Great laughter. I stepped backwards. A jab, then a hook. We were backed up against a fence. I could feel the wire strands against my legs and back. I brought my bare hands to my face. Closed my eyes. Soon I could feel my whole body being worked. I looked out from my fingers. A couple of flecks like ash floated around me. I spun out from the fence and surprised Graco with an uppercut that lifted his bare feet from the mud. The bones in my fingers crunched. A crowd gathered. Conka stood in the background, next to her husband. He raised his hand, cupped it around his mouth and yel ed. Another quick punch from Graco and my eardrums rang. A high wasting whine in my ears. I was aware of al the mil ing bodies around me. He ducked my second jab. I fel . Graco was smiling down at me, he thought it was something majestic, something intimate. He loved the idea of fighting an Englishman, it was pure hilarity to him. For al his smal size he was everywhere at once. “Get up.” A jab. A left hook. Another shout. “Get up, you shit-drink.” He tossed back his head to clear his locks from his eyes. I felt the fence against my back again and pul ed into it, held my hands over my face. Blood through my fingers. Graco seemed to have become melancholy, like he was hitting a tree. He went on punching and the roars changed, yelping noises from the kids, the adults silent and abstracted. Conka stood beside her husband, a soft grin on her face. Graco's knuckles snapped me and my head spun. A boot came in from the outer edge of the ring and caught me in the jaw. “You and al your pale pieces.” Another boot came in. A foot to my ribs. And then I realized that I was fighting for my life, scrabbling backwards in the mud, al the sounds merging, until I heard her voice going up, quiet, but nervous, and she broke the line, a few strands of dark hair between her teeth, and she shoved Graco backwards, and I had no hunger for it anymore, no desire, I stood with blood dripping from my eye and it dawned on me that Zoli, too, must have been watching al along.
She leaned in to me and put her scarf to my eye to staunch the blood and said: “They're only keeping warm, Swann, that's al .”
I suppose that in the beginning the changes seemed negligible enough—the switch in the eyes, the hunch into overcoats, the peepholes cut into doors, the darkened windows. It was a smal enough price to pay. A few isolated incidents. Raindrops, Stransky cal ed them. You put out your hand, he said, and al of a sudden they were there, almost lovely at first. But one by one these things became a form of light rain, and then the drops began to col ide, until after a while we were silently watching them come down in sheets. There was a refusal to talk unless we were in an open area, or in a hired car, or down by the water. Black Marias began to appear more and more on the streets. Soon we heard stories of folk dancers being sent off to dig canals, professors on dairy farms, philosophers folding back the cardboard flaps of orphanage boxes, shopkeepers lying facedown in the ditches, poets working in the armament factories. Signposts were sawed down. Streets were given new names. It was raining hard and we hid from it—yet it was our own rain, of our own making, and it promised to bring on a good
