foliage, what winter berries, then sets out to col ect whatever food she can find. She discovers, in the mud, a dead sparrow. It is against al custom to eat wild birds but what is custom now but an old and flightless thing? She spears the bird with a sharpened twig and roasts it in a low flame, turning it over and over, knowing at first bite that it wil not be good for her, al rot and age and use- lessness. Stil , in the urgency of hunger, she rips at it with her teeth and runs her tongue along where the heart once beat.
The tiny yel ow beak of the bird sits in the palm of her hand and she tilts it over and drops it into the flames.
She squats over the fire, thankful for her lighter. I must, she thinks, be careful in the use of it. Soon there wil be no more fuel. Smal fires are unseen. Smal fires can be perched above and drawn upwards into the body. Smal fires ignore curfew.
She feels her stomach churn, and, in the late hours, she lies tossing, turning, under Swann's blanket.
She rises dizzy, the sun a bright disc in the trees. A tal os-prey surveys her from a pine tree, his neck curved long and nonchalant, only his eyebal s moving. The branch looks built to him, a perfect blue and gray melding. The osprey turns as if bored, swings its long head to the side, pecks at its feathers, then takes off lazily into the forest.
Moments later it is on the bank, a fish in its beak. Zoli inches silently towards the fire, patiently picks up half a log, flings it. It misses the osprey but the log skitters and bursts into bright embers across the ice. The bird turns to look at her, drops the fish, then lifts its wings and bursts out over the reeds. She hobbles over to retrieve the fish; it is no bigger than the length of her hand.
“You could at least have found me a bigger one,” she says aloud.
The sound of her own voice surprises her, the clarity of it, crisp in the air. She looks quickly about her as if someone might be listening.
“You,” she says, looking around once more. “A big fish would have been more generous. You hear me?”
She chatters to herself as she builds up her fire. She eats the white flesh, licks the bones clean, then plunges her feet in the river once more. One more day and they wil be ready. I can walk and keep walking: long roads, fence lines, pylons. Nothing wil catch me, not even the sound of my own voice.
It had seemed so strange a few days ago, near the roadblock, when Paris leaped into her mind for no reason at al , but now it comes back and she tries the weight of the word upon her tongue.
“Paris.”
She stretches it out, a wide elegant avenue of sound.
The fol owing morning she builds up Swann's boots with the socks, places dry moss at the ankle of each, starts off along the riverbank, watching
for the osprey, expecting it to appear, stately, serene, to do something magnificent—to come down the river on a floe of ice, or to burst from the trees, but nothing stirs.
She finds a length of oak branch with a knobbed end and picks it up, tests it against the ground as a cane. It bends under her tal weight and she shakes the stick in the air.
“Thank you,” she says to the nothingness, then strikes out against the road with her new cane, clouds of white breath leaving her for the morning air.
Paris. An absurdity. How many borders is that? How many watchtowers? How many troopers lined along the barbed wire? How many roadblocks? She tries the word again, and it seems that it arrives in everything around her as the days go by, a Paris in the tree branch, a Paris in the mud of a roadside ditch, a Paris in a sidelong dog that retreats at a half-trot, a Paris in the red of a col ective tractor driven distantly across a field. She clings to its ridiculousness, its simple repetition. She likes the heft of it on her lips and finds that, as she goes along, it is a sound that helps her think of nothing at al , rhythmical y bumping against the air, carrying her forward, a sort of contraband, a repetition so formless, so impossible, so bizarre that it matches her footsteps and Zoli learns exactly when the first of the word wil hit with her heel against the ground, and the last of the word wil hit with her toe, so that she is going, in perfect conjunction, sound and step, onwards.
At the stil ness of a crossroads, she makes out the dot of a vehicle coming towards her, a motorbike, a flash of smal metal, and she takes cover with her back against the damp of a roadside ditch.
The motorbike bounces past with a tinny roar. It is Swann, she can tel by the lean of him, his crutches strapped to the back of the bike. She rises and watches him labor up the bumpy road, through smal countries of light and shadow, swerving once to avoid a rabbit. The animal bounds into a field, its ears held high as if amused by the encounter.
“You wil not find me,” she says to his disappearing form. She strikes the cane down hard on the road as the engine sound stutters into the distance. It seems to her, in the silence, that if it weren't for Swann she could almost sleep while walking.
In a tiny vil age market she buys a slab of meat, some cheese, a loaf of bread. “Comrade,” an old fruitsel er says to her, “are there many of you?”
The fruitsel er watches Zoli go as she cuts across a field and doubles back around to make sure she is not fol owed.
Later in the evening, not far from the vil age, she happens upon a burned-out camp, not in runic signs but a terrified clamber.
She stops short. So this, then, is why they asked. The marks are stil everywhere—in the returning grass, the ruts, the peg-holes, the mounds of earth where they hastily covered their fires. Around the camp, there is a zigzag of tires and, against the trees, a single burned-out carriage, its wheels missing. The hub of one wheel has been shoved into the earth while the rest— spokes and rim—have burned into the ground. An iron wheel-hoop, fused shapeless. Bits of melted canvas frozen against the burnt wooden boards. The tongue of the carriage pierces the muddy ground, as if it just bowed down and accepted defeat. Zoli touches the wood. One of the timbers fal s with a faint snap. The dark carcass of a radio sits in a corner of the carriage. She can tel by other marks in the ground that the men had tried to carry the carriage to the forest without benefit of horses but gave up after only a few paces. No sign of bones or weapons.
Zoli tears off the burnt canvas, cuts around it with her knife. Nothing else to salvage. She touches her left
