something breathing, until another long shadow passes within the box of light, and Zoli drops the tooth with a clank.
A farmer stands in the field outside, the rheumy-eyed dog at his heels. A face like a Hlinka guard: thick eyebrows and smal eyes and a neck with skinfolds. A long burlap sack lies at his feet; a shotgun clasped alongside his leg. He taps the gun against his high rubber boots, then hitches it to his waist and steps forward, moves out of the range of the window.
Zoli hears the clicking of dog nails, the turn of a boot at the entrance. She waits for him to come in, push the door open, put the shotgun to her neck and take her while the dog watches. The same dog, she thinks, that nosed in my own filth. She slides to the floor, brings her knees to her chest, tries to hold her breath. No movement, no sound, and she goes to the doorway. Her fingers reach around the frame and she pushes it gently, waits for the click of the gun or the thud of his fist in her face. The door swings open further and she peers around the frame.
Smal acts of kindness.
Outside, the farmer has left two bread rol s and a tin cup, half-fil ed with black tea. So what if others have drunk from it? I wil drink it anyway. She picks it up and sips, and for a split second she wonders if it has, perhaps, been poisoned.
She drinks the rest quickly, tucks the tin cup into the pocket of her skirt, touches the bread against her lips and inhales its freshness.
From the window, the farmer and dog are nowhere to be seen. Zoli rips a chunk of the bread and puts it in her mouth, then tongues it into her gum to soak up the last of the blood. At the window, only the same emptiness of trees and vineyard. She wipes a coatsleeve across her brow. Her forehead is dry and un-fevered now, and in the shard of mirror her face has already begun to lose its swel ing. Did I walk al day yesterday or did I just dream it? She digs deep in the fabric of her pocket, finds a pine nut and rol s it in her palm. In what sort of chance universe have I been brought back to a place where there is a waterpipe and a loaf of bread? In what curious conjunction of fever and road have I been al owed such generosity?
She eats half the farmer's bread and places the remainder in her zajda. Then, with a start, she remembers the rats: they wil nibble right through the cloth to get at the least crumb. Zoli shunts upwards with one foot on the windowframe and places the remaining bread on a crossbeam. She pushes it further along the beam with a twig. No good, she thinks, the rats wil fol ow from beam to beam, she has seen their like before. She goes up on her toes and knocks the bread down from the beam. With her headscarf, Zoli loops what is left of the loaf, then reaches up to tie the strange-looking bundle from an iron nail in the ceiling beam.
For a long time she wil recal herself by this: the loaf of bread, the ancient scarf, the spin of both in the air.
Years ago Conka got hold of a radio, one that used a wind-up handle. It worked for no more than thirty seconds at a time and then the signal faded, but in the middle of a wet afternoon, when the kumpanija was traveling near Jarmociek, a recording came over the radio, a broadcast from Prague. The horses were hauled short near a smal stream and were taken to be watered. Everyone sat listening to the radio, silent while Conka's husband wound the handle and Zoli's voice came through.
Later, while the horses were shaking out their manes, the youngest, Bora, climbed up on Zoli's lap and asked how was it possible for her to be in both places, inside the radio and on the road, at the exact same time. She had laughed then, they al laughed, and Conka pushed her fingers through Bora's hair. But something lay behind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other.
She wakes to the smal est one turning, face twitching. The other fol ows, fluent, waterlike. Nose to the floor, it whips across the boards to join its mate, both grown bold. Zoli backs into the corner and throws twigs across the floor, then builds three smal makeshift fires in a ring around her, flings lit pine needles towards the rathole.
She wonders what it might look like from the outside: the little wooden shed half-aglow in the darkness, tiny spears of light rol ing across the floor.
The morning rises along the windowledge. A long barrier of cloud is sliced by the movement of a tree branch in the wind. She looks down the length of her body. Her skirts are torn and there are smal lumps of dried dirt at her knees. Her feet, stil blood-raw and filthy. She stands, lifts her skirts. It is not right, she thinks, immodest, but it does not matter, I am not what I used to be. She rips a strip of white cloth from the underdress and folds it over, places it snugly at the back of her shoe. She tests it out, stepping lightly across the floor.
Only gadze knock.
She backs into the corner and sits, looking at the fire-marks beneath her, spreads her dresses over to hide them. Two more series of triple knocks. A grunt and a whisper, then rifle fire, she is sure it is rifle fire until she recognizes the high bark of a dog. The door is slowly pushed open
and the dog comes through, arcing its body. It snaps at the end of a rope, bares its teeth. Light spreads sideways into the hut. The farmer and a woman stand in the doorway, made into portrait by shadow.
The woman holds the shotgun and the farmer hovers behind her. Zoli wonders how they have made their silent approach, then notices that the dog has been muzzled: the contraption is hanging down in the farmer's hand.
The woman stands gray-haired, sturdy, much older than the farmer. She wears a housedress many sizes too smal . Her breasts swing low to her bel y. She shouts at the dog to quieten. The dog whimpers and the hair roaches momentarily along its back. The woman looks around, finger stil on the trigger of the gun. She glances at the burnt twig-ends and the smal teepee of ashes, the one empty sandal in the middle of the floor.
Spreading back the loop of Zoli's skirts with her foot, she bends down and examines her face.
The long hairs on the woman's chin, the flare-out of her nose, the tiny twitch of her mouth, the smokeblue of her neck, the very green of her eyes, narrow, like the wick-slot of a lamp.
She tilts the gun, lifts Zoli's chin. “We have laws here,” she says. “We have curfew.” The barrel touches, cold, against Zoli's throat.
“Are you going far? Hey. Gypsy woman. I am talking to you. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
