It would, she thinks, have been just as easy to have stepped out in front of it.
She returns the way she came and sits under a giant sycamore, pul s a fistful of yel owed grass from the ground and puts it in her mouth against her aching tooth. She removes her over- coat and ties the arms together around her waist. It was Swann who gave her the coat a year ago. He had returned from Brno with a whole cardboard box of them balanced precariously on his motorbike. He had bought them for the kumpanija and had even found smal sizes for the children. He could not understand her when she said no, that she did not want them, that she'd just as soon walk around with a yel ow armband, or a truncheon stuck in her back. Swann sat in the wooden chair by his window, perplexed: “But it's not charity, Zoli, it's just a few coats, that's al .” He remained silent then, tapping the glass pane, his light hair framing his face. She crossed the room and said: “I'l take one each for Conka's children.” He brightened and sifted through the pile to find the right sizes. “One for you too,” he said, and put it around her, and as he touched her shoulders, he said that he had found a consignment of red shirts also. What strange laughter had come to her then, the idea of the whole kumpanija wandering down the road in the exact same cheap red shirts.
Yet what was once funny turned out to be inevitable; what was once strange was, now, final y, true.
Zoli feels as if she is carrying the sandy-haired Englishman on her back. Impossible to shuck him. She wonders how long she might walk before the weight of him drags her down, again, to the ground. He told her once that she looked like a Russian poet he had seen in photographs: the dark eyes, high forehead, her hair swept back, her tal body, her complicated stare. He brought her to the National Library and showed her the poet, Akhmatova, though she could see no resemblance. She had always thought herself dark, simple, black, yet in the photos the Russian woman looked white, heavy-eyed, and beautiful. Swann read to her a line about standing as witness to the common lot. He had asked her if she would marry him and she was stunned by the simplicity of his plea. She had loved him then, but he did not know the extent of the impossible. In the printing mil , at the end, he was not able to hold her gaze. He had not printed the poems yet, but she knew he would. What else had she expected? Where happiness was not a possibility, the il usion of it was always more important. Wasn't it Swann who told her once about a bird, a glukhar, that went deaf with its own mating cal s? Both of us with that inextinguishable need to make noise, she thinks. If only I could have known. If only I could have seen.
Zoli wonders now if Swann is searching for her now. If he is, she thinks, he wil not find me. He wil seek and seek. He wil wander the ends of the earth and return with nothing, not even a name.
Zoli clambers over a gate, down a hil , through a muddy field, where some irrigation pipes are laid out on the ground. She tries to figure a way to make it across the field: a maze of tubes and muck with a barbed-wire fence at the far end. The vast concrete sleeves have sunk a little in the mud, and the only way to cross is to walk along the top of the pipes, arms held wide for balance. She slips, her leg in the mud up to her ankle. She lifts it out noisily, cleans her sandal on the rough edge of the pipe, kneels down into the opening and looks into the hol-lowness of it, imagines her breath traveling al the way around the field, circling and returning, added to by the grasses and the muck.
“Hey, Gyp.”
A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hil , four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.
The other children top the hil and cal back to him. He lets out a long arc of spit which lands a meter in front of her, then turns and gal ops up the slope.
They wil bring back the adults, thinks Zoli. Cite me for trespassing. Bring a sergeant to arrest me. Fingerprint me. Find out who I am. Take me back to the city. Place me in front of my people again, shame me, humiliate me. Banish me once more.
She scrambles across the pipes and up the hil , each step a half-step backwards into the last.
A wooden stake scrapes her ankle and she stops in midfur-row, looks up, catches sight of a wooden roof. So here I am. I have walked al day and have come ful circle, and am back in the vineyard once again. I could just as easily be anywhere else. I have spent another day walking, and what else is there to do? Nothing else. If there has been a pencil beneath me it would have made great, useless circles.
She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the smal round scorch mark of her fire from the night
before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a smal light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swol en terribly.
The whole of her right cheek is puffy, her neck bloated, her right eye almost shut. I must deal with the tooth now. Be done with it. Pul it out.
In a corner she finds a single boot, the lace stil intact. It is against al custom to touch the boot, another smal betrayal, unclean, taboo, but she yanks at the lace until it pul s through, scattering smal flakes of dried mud. She rubs the lace in her fingers to warm it, holds it beneath the dripping pipe to moisten the fabric. She makes a loop in the string, reaches into her mouth, hooks the tooth and draws in a sharp breath, yanks hard upwards, tries not to dry-heave. She feels the roots being dragged up from the bottom of her jawbone. Eyes ful of tears. Blood fal ing now from her mouth to her chin. She wipes it away, head to her shoulder, closes her eyes, hauls again. Darkness.
The tooth rises and tears and for a moment she sees little Woowoodzhi, feverish against a tree, a nail perfectly inserted between his handbones, and he is gone, then back again, feverish once more, and she tugs harder, his smal face dissolving.
A sound rips through her jawbone like the tearing of paper, and the tooth lifts.
In the morning she feels for the gap with the edge of her tongue. The wound is large and she wonders if she should try to sear it shut, sterilize it with her lighter. She rises to rinse her mouth out in the trickle from the tap. She lifts the tooth from the sink, dark and rotten at its base, the roots clotted and fibrous.
On the wal above the sink, there is a perfect trapeze of light from the rising sun. She watches it crawl, like
