plains and in the distance huge mountains, with clouds halfway up them, capped with snow against the blue sky— so this, then, was Austria and the West, what a strange way to see it, through an open gate, with nurses shuffling in the dust behind me, and a rifle pointed at me.
Along came a tal gray-haired woman with four soldiers trailing behind her. She had the air of a bureaucrat but she stood in front of me and said: This is a D.P. camp, don't worry.
Her voice was calm. We're here to help you, she said. She took another step forward.
Displaced persons, she said.
When I tried to break the line of soldiers, one of them caught me in the shoulder with the end of his rifle. The woman knocked his gun aside and said: Leave her alone, you brute. She bent down to me and began whispering that I would be al right, not to fret, she was a doctor, she would take care of me. Yet I did not trust her—who would? I pushed away from her, began to walk towards the red and white gate, my head held tal , my body straight.
Okay, said the woman, put her in cuffs.
They brought me to a gray building where the nurses undressed me. A few soldiers stood outside the shower room and although most of them looked away, one or two came to the smal window and looked inside. I sat on a hardbacked chair under the stream of water, while the nurses rubbed me fiercely with hard soap and brushes on long broom handles.
I tried to hide my nakedness. On and on they went about how I wore no breast support, about how I smel ed, and that there was no smel on earth like a Gypsy, but stil I said nothing. Near the end of the shower one of the soldiers put his pink tongue against the glass and licked it. I curled into myself and closed my eyes. They threw me a towel, then led me to another hospital room where they razored my hair. When I looked down on the floor there were some white larvae moving through the clumps. I had no feeling. It was my hair, but so what? It hardly mattered, it was just another ornament. Since a young age I had cut it off many times, always against custom. They sprayed me with a white powder that made my eyes itch. I did not al ow them to know I could speak a little German, but I understood their words and believe me they were not talking of me as a flower that had sprung from the earth.
I had escaped an old life and was caught in a new one, but I could have no sympathy for myself, it was of my own making.
I was brought back to the ward. The doctor put her stethoscope to my chest. She said I was being held for my own safety, she would look after me, I was protected under international treaties, there was no cause for concern. She had the confident voice of one who did not believe a single word she was saying.
Her name was Doctor Marcus, from Canada, and she spoke German like she had just shoved a fistful of stones into her mouth. She said she would give me medical quarantine for a month or two, but after that I would have to apply for refugee status and then I would be al owed the status of the other displaced people. On her desk Doctor Marcus had some of my possessions: my Party card, my knife, some paper krowns wrinkled from the lakewater, and the coin Conka had given me, stil wrapped in strands of her fine red hair. I reached out to get my possessions but she dropped them in a large paper envelope and said that they would be returned when I began to comply. She spun the coin in her fingers, dropped it in the envelope, and closed the clasp. A hair had fal en onto the desk.
Are you wil ing to talk to me? the doctor asked.
I pretended again that I was mute. Doctor Marcus spoke into an intercom system, instructed them to bring in the translator, an enormous heap of a woman who asked me question after question, in Czech and Slovak both, who I was, how I got a Party card, what had happened to me, how did I cross the border, did I know anyone in Austria and, of course their favorite question, was I real y a Gypsy? I looked like one, they said, I dressed in colorful rags like one, but I did not seem like one. I sat stil with my hands in my lap. The translator told me to nod yes or no to her questions. Are you Czech? Are you Slo-vakian? Are you Gypsy? Why have you come in from Hungary? This coin is an unusual coin, isn't it? Is this your identity card?
Are you a Communist? I sat stil . The best way around her was silence. When they were finished, the translator threw her hands up in the air but Doctor Marcus leaned forward and said: I know you understand us, we only want to help you, why don't you let us?
I lifted the single strand of Conka's hair from the desk and they took me off to quarantine.
So much time was spent in the white rooms of the hospital that I began to think back on al that had happened. My voice is strong now when I recal this, but back then I was a weak and terrified thing, and I stopped in every corner I could find, real or not. I did not want the roads of my childhood to return, I attempted to put them out of my mind, but the more I did so the more they appeared.
We used to make potato candles, Conka and I, we hol owed them out and lit the thin wal s of potato with light, and in winter Conka loved to skate with the lit candles in her hands, tree to tree, they kept her hands warm. She had a pair of skates her father had made from old boots and knifeblades. Sometimes the lights went out when she turned on the skates, or skidded and fel , or sometimes the ice sprayed up and put out the wick-flame. Above us the stars swung. These and other things returned to me while I lay in the Austrian bed—I sometimes felt as if I were stil out on the ice. I heard cracking and saw hands reaching up for me. I could hear boots in the forest and there stood Swann and there stood Vashengo and there stood Stran-sky, rifling through a sheaf of papers and, behind them again, a row of bureaucrats and nurses and officers and guards. I turned and thrashed about in the bed, but the pictures returned harder, faster, with the insistence of things impossible to shake.
Doctor Marcus arrived at the end of my bed every noon, her stethoscope twinkling in the light, a row of pens in her pocket, one with a Canadian flag, and although she looked not a bit like
Swann, I could not help thinking that she was like a sister to him, with her light hair, hazel eyes, her oval face.
You don't have to suffer, she said. There's no point. Why don't you tel me your situation and then I can help?
It was like an old song, a children's rhyme, I had heard it so often, it was as if she had taken the words of a bureaucrat and put them in a child's mouth.
I know you can talk, she said. The nurses heard you. On the first day, you were screaming in a language they didn't recognize, surely it was Gypsy, am I right, was it Gypsy?
I turned away.
