stand with hands folded across their stomachs. He tries to catch their gaze, but they look beyond him and away with thousand-yard stares. Strange, he thinks, that they do not question him; maybe they've mistaken him for a policeman or a social worker or a parole officer or some other government fuckwad here on an official visit.
He feels briefly powerful as Robo leads him deeper into the warren of mudroutes.
Doorframes used as tables. Sackcloth for curtains. Empty cucu bottles strung up as windchimes. At his feet, bits of wood and porridge containers, lol ipop sticks and shattered glass, the ground-down bones of some dead animal. He catches glimpses of babies hammocked from ceilings, flies buzzing around them as they sleep. He reaches for his camera but is pushed on in the swel of children. Open doorways are quickly closed. Bare bulbs switched off. He notices carpets on the wal s, and pictures of Christ, and pictures of Lenin, and pictures of Mary Magdalene, and pictures of Saint Jude lit by smal red candles high above empty shelves. From everywhere comes the swel of music, no accordions, no harps, no violins, but every shack with a TV or a radio on ful volume, an endless thump.
Robo leans over and shouts in his ear, “Over here, Uncle, fol ow me,” and it strikes him how foreign this boy, how distant, how dark-skinned.
He is led around a sharp corner to the largest shanty of al . A satel ite dish sits new and shiny on the roof. He knocks on the plywood door. It swings open a little further with each knuckle rap. Inside there is a contingent of eight, nine, maybe ten men. They raise their heads like a parliament of ravens. A few of them nod, but they continue their hand, and he knows the game is nonchalance—he has played it himself in other parts of the country, the flats of Bratislava, the ghettos of Presov, the slums of Letanovce.
In the far corner of the room he notices two women watching him, wide-eyed. A hand pushes him at the smal of his back. “I'l wait for you here, mister,” says Robo, and the door creaks behind him.
He looks around the room, the immaculate floor, the ordered cupboards, the whiteness of the one shirt hanging on a nail from the ceiling.
“Nice house,” he says, and knows immediately how foolish it sounds. He flushes red-cheeked, then draws himself tal . In the corner sits a broad-shouldered man, tough, hard-jawed, gray hair tousled after a bad night's sleep. He steps across and announces quite softly that he's a journalist, he's here on a story, he'd like to talk to some of the old folk.
“We're the old folk,” says the man.
“Right,” he says, and pats his jacket. He fumbles in his pocket and breaks open a pack of Marlboros. Stupid, he knows, not to have broken the seal already. In the silence the others watch him. His hands shake. A bead of sweat runs down his brow. He can almost hear the chest hair rustle under his shirt. He unwinds the plastic, lifts the cel ophane, and shoves three cigarettes up like peeping toms.
“Just want to talk,” he says.
The man waits for a light, blows the smoke sideways.
“About what? ”
“The old days.”
“Yesterday was long,” says the man with a laugh, and the laughter ripples around the room, tentatively at first, until the women catch it and it builds, unraveling the tension. He is suddenly slapped on the shoulder and his grin breaks wide, and the men start to talk in an accent that starts low and ends high, musical, fast, jangly. Some of the words appear to be in Romani, and from what he can make out, the man's name is Boshor. He reaches past Boshor, throws the cigarettes on the table, and the men casual y reach for them. The women step across, one of them suddenly young and beautiful. She bends for a light, and he looks away from the low swing of her breasts. Boshor points to the cards and says: “We're playing for a little food, a little drink too.” The man pul s again on the cigarette. “We're not real y drinkers, though.”
He takes his cue from Boshor, opens a button, slips back his shirtfront, exposing his flabby chest, and removes the first bottle like a trophy.
Boshor picks up the bottle, turns it in his hands, nods approval, and rattles off a salvo of Romani to more laughter.
He watches as the young girl reaches into a cupboard. She takes down a mahogany box with a silver clasp, opens it wide. A matching set of china cups. She puts them on the table, unscrews the bottle. He is given, he notices, the only china cup that is not chipped.
Boshor leans back and gently says: “Health.”
They clink cups, and Boshor leans forward to whisper: “Oh, it's for money too, friend. We're playing cards for money.”
He doesn't even flinch; he slaps down two hundred krowns. Boshor takes it, slips it into his trousers, smiles, blows smoke towards the ceiling.
“Thank you, friend.”
The cards are put aside, and the drinking starts in earnest. He is amazed how close Boshor sits to him, their knees touching, the dark of the hand on his jacketsleeve, and he wonders now how he wil navigate their secrets— even their Slovak is a little difficult to understand, their country dialect
—but soon enough the second bottle is on the table. He does it calmly and quickly, as if to suggest it's always been there. The drinking unfolds, and they begin to talk to him about crooked mayors and bent bureaucrats and subsidies and the dole, and how Kolya was beaten with a pickaxe last week and how they are not al owed into the pubs—“We're not even al owed within fifty fucking meters”—al the things they know a journalist wants to hear. Even the Gypsies have soundbites, he thinks, as if he should be surprised, al the words down pat
—
“Everything that gets stolen is what we steal,” says Boshor as he leans forward, his eyes slightly bloodshot and tinged with yel ow. “It's always us, isn't it? We're prouder than that, you know.”
He nods at Boshor, shifts in his chair, seeks a pocket of silence, passes around more cigarettes, and flicks the matchstick to extinguish the flame.
