Zoli

crop, we were sure of it, so we let it fal . Already too much had been invested in the Revolution, and we weren't prepared to give in to the despair that things would not work out. It was so much like desire.

“Are you fucking her, Swann? “ Stransky asked one evening when the two of us sat together at the back of the Pelikan cafe. The place smel ed of old overcoats. I looked around, table to table, at the gray faces, watching us watching them. The truth—and Stransky knew it—was that nobody was fucking her, though we al wanted to in whatever way we could.

“None of your business,” I said.

He laughed his tired laugh, lifted his glass.

I walked out and was startled to notice that we were under the gaze of a cameraman who was clicking pictures from the window of a black Tatra.

The darkness rose up like it was coming from the cobbles.

For Zoli's kumpanija, the changes had begun with Woo-woodzhi, a young man who had taken to nailing his own hand to a tree. He was a hard case, a schizophrenic. The families heaved with loyalty, and Woowoodzhi was among their favorites. His bandages were changed every few hours.

Zoli brought him boiled sweets from the city and whispered nighttime legends in his ear. Woowoodzhi rocked back and forth at the sound of her voice. Whenever he strayed from the caravans the alarm went—saucepans were banged—and the women spread out along the forest edges to look for him. The boy would often be found, hammering the nails into his hands. He never cried out, not even when hot poultices were put to his palm.

In the middle of an autumn rainstorm a tal blond nurse was driven up to the caravans at the edge of the forest. She stepped out of her car into the mud, up to her ankles. She screeched for help and so the blonde was carried, with pomp and ceremony, to one of the caravans. She was given hot tea and her shoes were cleaned. She nipped the clasp of her handbag. A badge said she was from the Ministry of Health. She unfurled a piece of paper and thrust it out. Zoli was cal ed upon to read it.

“It's a mistake,” said Zoli. “It must be.”

“It's no mistake, Citizen. Can you not read?”

“I can read.”

“Then you must do what it says.”

Zoli stood up, tore the paper into pieces, stuffed it back into the woman's palm. It was an order to bring Woowoodzhi to the local mental institution.

“Please leave,” said Zoli.

“Just give me the child and there'l be no problems.”

Zoli spat at the woman's feet. A riffle of whispers went around the caravan. The woman blanched and reached for Zoli's arm, dug her fingers in:

“The child needs proper care.”

Zoli backhanded her twice across the face. A cheer went up around the caravan.

Two hours later the troopers arrived but al the Gypsies were gone—they had disappeared without a trace.

Stransky loved the story—the troopers arrived at the mil with an arrest warrant for Zoli and told us everything—and I had to admit it thril ed me too, but we had no idea where to find the kumpanija. We searched and found nothing, not even a rumor.

Without Zoli they were days of gnawing restlessness and gloom. Flocks of gul s argued above the Danube. I worked at the mil , attended a conference on Russian typography, then sat at home, books propped open on my chest—Mayakovsky, Dreiser, Larkin.

It was a ful two months later, on a day of slanting sunlight, that Zoli arrived back. She looked different: a moving rawness. In the mil she stood amid the noise and the high clacking of machinery, inhaled the smel of grease and ink. I hurried across to greet her, but she leaned away from me.

“Where've you been?” asked Stransky from the staircase.

“Here and there,” she said.

He repeated it and half-laughed, went up the staircase, and left us alone together.

She drew herself up to a height. I watched as she stepped towards the hel box and searched through the old broken ingots, looked at al the backward letters, arranged them to form a song that she had composed in her mind, My grave is hiding from me, a quick and luminous poem where she said she felt locked like wood within a tree. She set the letters out on the counter and pressed her hands down on the hard metal. She said she could stil feel bits of Woowoodzhi in her cuticles: he had died, she said, from a bout of influenza, contracted on the same night that the caravans were trying to escape.

“They kil ed him, Stephen.”

“Be careful, Zoli,” I said, looking around.

“I don't know what careful means,” she said. “What does careful mean? Why should I be careful?”

“You've seen the news?”

In her absence, Zoli had become something of a cult figure— the arrest warrant had been torn up by no less than the Minister of Culture himself.

A new tomorrow was on the way, he said. Part of it would include the Roma. Zoli was the subject of a whole new series of editorials that professed she had been painting the old world so it could final y, at last, change. They saw her as heroic, the vanguard of a new wave of Romani thinkers.

One of her poems had been reprinted in a Prague-based university journal. Tapes of her singing were played again on the radio. The further away she was the bigger she had become. Now there was talk in government circles