I cannot tel you, chonorroeja, how low my heart dropped at the sight of this woman, and I knew almost immediately that I would have to escape, not only because I was pol uted, but because eventual y they would know, they would feel it from me, I tel you the bare truth, a Rom always knows, and I would bring the shame to them too. She took my hand in hers and gave me a slab of bread. I cannot do this, I thought, I am a traitor. And yet what was I betraying? What was left of my old self to betray? How distant I felt from the Zoli who had spent many hours in the rooms of Budermice, and the ringing phones of the writers’ union, and the pulsing machines of Stransky's printing mil , and the shining chandeliers of the Carlton Hotel, and al the other places I met Doom and put on her shining jewelry.
Now here was bread being put in my hands by a dark sister, jabbering in our sweet and ancient tongue.
Her name was Mozol. She grabbed my elbow and pul ed me inside the dark barracks—her blankets, several bundles, a series of mats unrol ed on the floor—and pointed at a fat man sleeping under a hat, on a tattered couch. That's my husband, Panch, she said, he's lazier than a bad sin. He snores even when he walks, I tel you. Come, come, I wil show you around. We are rich with room. None of the gadze want to be with us, so we have the whole barracks to ourselves, can you imagine?
She touched my cheek then spun me around and dizzied me with her voice: Lord above, I kiss your tired eyes.
With Mozol al I had to do was nod and listen. She put one and two words together, and soon they made ten thousand. Her endless jabberjaw fil ed my ears, but it felt as if a salve had been put at the raw points of my mind. She showed me around the barracks, led me through the camp towards the shop where I could use the ration slips. On and on Mozol talked, I am not sure she ever paused for breath. Her husband couldn't get a word in either. He cal ed her his little nightingale, but even then she would drown out his voice with her babble. Mozol had seven children and was working on her eighth, and if there was nobody around to talk to she would have talked to her own bel y.
Al hardships, chonorroeja, have a streak of laughter in them.
Those few days are welded into me now and I cannot speak of them quietly. I took on a life I did not know. I was no longer a poet nor a singer, or one who read books, not even one who traveled. I woke in the same place each day. I put a saucepan of coffee on. I aired the mattress, beat it with
my bare hands. I ate with Mozol's family around their three-legged pot. I was privy to their yarns and confidences. I had never had such a life before.
I swapped out my clothes for a few of the Portuguese dresses once again. I caught sight of myself, colorful, in the windows of the offices. My hair grew, and I sewed the coin in the strands. My old language bore me to the window.
You may ask why I did not leave, move out from the camp under cover of darkness, and keep moving, why I brought the secret shame to Mozol's family, why I never told them who I was and what had happened to me. The fence surrounding the barracks was so low that a child could have climbed it, but we were scared of what lay outside. The awfulness of the camp was less than the fear of what lay beyond. And I wil also tel you this: there was a terrible plague of insects one day a few weeks after I left the camp hospital, grubby little things with smal yel ow wings. I got up early one morning and found a good many of these insects clinging to the wal . They had lost their way, and had clung there until dead, held fast by their tiny claws, stiffened into their last moment. I went to wipe the dead ones away, but as soon as I did one of them, just one, came out of its stiffened pose, and I bore it on a cloth to the open window with the one bit of life stil left in it.
And so, for a while, I al owed myself to live under the awning of my own people once again. An invisible hand had reached in and turned my heart a smal notch backwards.
In the camp I had taken one great big year of breath and held on to it. I did not attempt to escape.
Mozol and I began to col ect flowers, which we sold in the marketplace near to Domplatz. At home in the barracks we buried our money in the corner behind the stove. Mozol had spent twelve years in the camps, her children had been born there, and she dreamed of nothing more than leaving, but she needed a country to take her in, and who would sponsor the Gypsies when they thought of us as something less than human? But one morning she came running up to me and thrust a paper into my hand, a Canadian insignia stamped on it. Doctor Marcus had told her what was in the letter. I opened the envelope, took a glance, and then announced myself happy indeed. Mozol gazed at me. How did you know what the letter said? she asked. My spirits dropped. How did you know what the letter said, my heart's friend? I looked to the ground. I almost told her that I had read it, daughter, that I could indeed read and write, that al along I had brought the shame to her, but I caught myself. I walked across the high wire then, saying I was able to feel what was in the letter, it tril ed through my toes, it was intuition. She looked at me doubtful y but I spun her around in the dust and she began to laugh. She was on her way to Toronto, but within a few days another note came to say that she and Panch would have to pay for a portion of their own passage. The nurse who read the letter aloud had a shine in her eyes when she read it. The fare was enormous, it would have bought them a patch of land. Mozol could not understand. Surely I can go by train, she said. To Canada? said the nurse and she laughed.
Mozol lay in her wickerbound bed crying. Bit by bit she began to descend, if you can imagine, into silence. She said that Jesus had wept for everyone, but the gadze had put a roof in the sky and yel ed down destruction so his tears could not refresh us. I have never real y believed in God or a heaven or any of that loud ranting, but I believed in it for her, it is what she wanted. She ran rosary beads through her fingers and I cal ed back our old prayer:
Later that week we were sitting on the steps of the barracks. An ant crossed in front of me, carrying another ant bent double. I pressed my hand to the cool earth. The ant stopped at my hand and looked for a way around but then climbed my fingers and took the body of the dead one across. I leaned down and blew it gently off my finger.
We fal out of rhythm with our earliest ways. There were so many times when I had forgotten my old life, I even forgot I was pol uted, or maybe I had just put a rag on the blade, and in some ways I had begun to think of myself as Mozol's sister. The decision had no fear. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why. I knew the town wel . I did not like what I was about to do, daughter, but I had forced myself not to think about it. I cut the nerve that twitched in me and went to the dump at the edge of town. Some piles of rubbish were smoking from early fires.
Ash and dust wheeled in the air. I rescued the door of a thrown-away cupboard, yel ow with flaking paint. I tore it from its hinges and gauged its weight. I carved a set of maple leaves and a griffin on either side of the door —ridiculous, of course, but I did not care.
I fashioned two grand rubber earrings from parts of a discarded carburetor.
