stunned, leaning close to her.
How distant now, thinks Zoli.
Cowboy films.
The sky lightens over the city as she makes her way across the tramtracks, down towards the river in the early morning. A rusty fishing boat sloughs through the wide channel, pul ing behind it a trail of smoke. She climbs the long ramp to the bridge, her back bent beneath the bundle. Zoli totals up what she has to her name: one hundred and sixty krowns, an onyx-handled knife, one bedsheet, two blankets, an overcoat, boots, a pair of Swann's trousers, three shirts, a hairbrush, a pair of thick gloves, a tin cup, and a tea towel.
Someone has inserted a bouquet of flowers into the ironwork curls of the bridge. Zoli leans against the drooping stems and looks down into the water. The wind fans across the surface, ricocheting off the far bank. I should throw something in the water, climb the railing, and leap right here. Tie a kerchief around my chin. Spread my arms out. Say nothing. Tumble. Hit the surface with my skirt above my head. Disappear into the depths.
Send up a flume of spray.
She recognizes the thought in an instant: it is gadzikano, vacant, pathetic. She wil not al ow them such simplicity.
How stupid I was. I went to their table and kissed it in thanks. They promised to leave us alone, but they did not. How strange it was to be so liked amongst those she could never quite comprehend: the parties, the chalets, the hotel gatherings, the way they rol ed her out at the conventions. Their vodka, their caviar, their sweet haluski. They packaged me up and made an eloquent ribbon of me and then they al owed me the short walk up the hangman's ramp. The noose, the trapdoor, the lever.
Lightheaded, Zoli pauses on the bridge and looks down at the river, and in the vertigo of shadow there is the sudden realization that she has not burned her poems at al ; there are hundreds of them stil out there, in printed copies, in the mil , in the union houses, even in the bookshops along Zelena. Al she has done is burn the originals and given strength to the others.
Zoli crosses to the end of the bridge at a slow walk and stands at the junction on the far side. West, the towers. South, the road away. She pul s her arms close in against her stomach, cradles her elbows in the palms of her hands, hikes her belongings on her back, and shuffles down past the line of red dump-sters, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence. Tractors move in the early morning. Cement tankers. Men alongside the sheet-metal huts, their slick yel ow jackets bright against the morning gray. One bends over a pot, stirring coffee. She moves beyond him, unnoticed. Most of the towers are inhabited now but there are three blocks stil under construction. The grand experiment. They wanted the best for the Gypsies, they said— as if they could be a single throbbing organism, forty thousand people lumped into one. Running water, electric switches, heating.
You hurry on the light, she thinks, it just hastens the darkness.
Zoli ducks through another hole in the barbed wire and stops at a long wal , a distance from the caravans. Hundreds of wagons are strewn around, stil clumped together by kumpa-nija. At least they did not burn the carriages, she thinks, only the wheels.
She leans forward, the imprint of the pebbles against her hands.
In the barren squares of grass, a few of the wagons are already ringed with campfires. Pins of firelight wheel the air. One or two dim figures move in and out of the shadows. So, some have abandoned the towers already, taken the floorboards out, come down to the ground, burnt what should have been beneath their feet. A smal triumph. Further along the wal , someone has put up a lean-to against the concrete blocks. Old roofing tin, wooden boards from the apartment floors, and an orange highway sign. She squints to read it.
Zoli presses against the corner of the wal and peers into the distance. A wreckage of a dog paddles beside the hulk of an abandoned car, recently burned out, as if someone has died in it. At the far end of the camp, a child rol s a barrel hoop and beyond him a man stands by the fire.
She knows Vashengo by the outline of his hat alone. Graco carries a coal-oil lamp. Milena, Jolana, Eliska, and one or two of the children are already awake. No Conka.
She pushes her palms deeper into the pebbled wal , favoring one leg so her hip tilts out. She longs to tilt the other forward and stride into the camp, but she is as separate from them now as she can ever be. She watches the nickering campfires, the cigarettes traveling at mouth level, a rimless wheel of red light moving. I would, she thinks, set fire to al my words just to travel that air once more.
Some children break the line beyond the campfires towards the wal . From where do they come? How far down the road were they driven? Zoli steps back and turns her face into the col ar of Swann's overcoat. In what words wil the children speak of me now that I have vanished?
High above the towers a yel ow crane swings through the air. It stops for a moment, lets a bundle dangle and swerve in the middle of the air. It settles, then starts to swing once more. Zoli pul s at her zajda, brings it tight around her, and ducks back out through the fence.
It feels to her, as she walks, that she has just pul ed her entire body over a region of barbed wire.
Hiding was part of an old language but they had not hidden wel . Not this time. It had snowed and the fields lay touched with a phosphorous glow.
They had been picked out easily, bright colors against the snow. The troopers arrived on motorbikes and in vans. They trudged across the fields, unscrol ed a copy of the new law, then stood back, curious, when Vashengo said they did not want to go. The troopers had thought it was an easy sel .
