I made a complicated series of hand gestures and finished by scrunching my fingers down into the palm of my hand, like grinding a tooth that might once have laid there, long ago. The fruit farmer shook his head and sighed. He steered with his knee and lit yet another cigarette. Two streams of pale blue smoke came from his nostrils and then he leaned across and passed the cigarette to me. I shook my head, no, but another voice said take it, Zoli, for crying out loud take it. He shrugged and held the cigarette near the window, and I watched as it reddened and burned down. Sparks flew from his fingers. The smel of tobacco made my head spin. That was one of my first lessons about the West—they do not ask twice. You should always say yes. Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes.
The road sped beneath us. For the first time I began to think I was truly in a different country. I turned to look at a family col ecting blackberries at the side of the road until they became smal dots in the distance. Tal silos gave way to church steeples and, near the outskirts of a large town, the farmer pul ed into the roadside verge. Right, here we are, he said. He climbed out, lifted a tarp and handed me some apples. I've always had a passion for the traveling life, he said. I nodded. Just steer clear of the Kieberer, he said, and you'l be al right.
For whatever reason I forgot my mute ways and asked: What's a Kieberer?
He did not blink an eye and said: The gendarmes.
Oh, thank you, I said.
He laughed long and hard and then said: I thought as much.
I felt my body tighten and I yanked the door handle, but he threw his head back and laughed again.
He drove the truck alongside me as I tried to walk away along the verge of the road. Traffic was zooming past and blaring their horns. To one side was a grazing field, the other a stoneworks. When I quickened my pace the fruit farmer quickened too. He was rol ing tobacco with two hands and steering the truck with his knees, but then he brought the truck to a halt, sealed the paper with his tongue, leaned out the window and gave me two hand-rol ed cigarettes. I took them straightaway.
I'm fond of escape stories, he said.
He clanged through the gears and drove off in a cloud. I stood watching and thought: Wel , here I am in Austria, with two hand-rol ed cigarettes and a man waving me goodbye from a battered fruit truck, if ever I had four guesses of where I would be after so many years, al of them would be wrong.
That night I found some lovely gardens, dense and private, to sleep in. A hard breeze was approaching, announced in advance by the clapping of house shutters. Rain came and I huddled against a wal . I woke to find that I had spent the night beneath a monument to war. Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especial y for the carvers of stone, and I thought about the truth of that, when in every smal vil age of Europe you can see Christ or Soldier hammered out in stone. But who, on a battlefield, chonorroeja, wants a monument? Who, in the middle of his fighting, thinks he wil one day be in the hands of a mason?
I cursed my old poems and went down to the town square— I did not even know what town I was in—and told a series of fortunes for a paltry sum that brought me enough for a train ticket. A shiny train stood on the tracks. Questions rattled in my mind. Where could I go? How could I break a border without a passport? What place might accept me? I tried pushing these thoughts aside. I would buy a ticket west, that was al . I was halfway through the queue at the ticket window when two gendarmes appeared. One lifted my chin with the cold end of his truncheon. He turned and whispered to his col eague. I had a fair idea that they would make their own statue of me, so when the gendarme looked over again, this Gypsy woman was gone once more, on foot.
You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you fol ow the val eys and the rivers. It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that wil guide you along anyway.
My river was the Murz, clear and leaping. I walked for many days, hugging the bank. On the floodplain there were a few smal huts where I could lie down and sleep for a few hours, sometimes on swales of straw. I watched the circles of a hawk swooping down for food in the tilted grass. I made a canopy above my head with sticks and an old cloth bag to keep out rain and sunshine. When I was forced to move from the riverbank and fol ow the direct line of the road, there were always a few kind drivers who brought me a distance down the val ey. I knew that I was going west by the fal and rise of the sun. Flocks of wild geese flew overhead, and I saw myself as one who lagged behind their formations. In places the road became wide and ambitious with more lanes than I had ever seen before, although, where possible, I stil kept to the smal back-ways or the riverbank. Voices rang out from steepled churches. Laughter and good smel s spil ed from restaurants. In the smal er vil ages, some of the Austrians taunted me—Gyp, thief, Black Pharaoh—though just as many raised their hats in greeting, or sent their children after me with cheese, bread, cake. A boy put me on a scooter and promised to take me around a railway tunnel but he did not, he simply rode his scooter up and down in front of his friends who jeered and taunted. I pretended to put a spel on him and he stopped—they are so fearful, sometimes, of their own invented fears.
Once I passed a burning house in the night with the family outside. I returned and gave to them what little food I had, some bread, some strips of chicken meat. They did not throw the food to the ground as I expected, they just huddled down, prayed, and thanked me, and it struck me then that the world is as varied in goodness as it is in evil.
I had acquired the confidence of a blind woman—I could have stepped down the road with my eyes ful y closed. I was fol owing the grass along the busy way to Kapfenberg, Bruck, Leoben, when the mountains began to rise, higher even than the biggest of the Shivering Hil s. I paused at the path heading south, and the other heading north, and took, like many times before, the wrong one. I walked north along a different river, the mountains crowding in closer, the trees on the cliff faces above me, steep rocks held back by giant nets. The traffic whizzed past and it was then that I saw signs for a tunnel, a red sign with a white border. Nothing petrified me more—even when I was a child I refused to go into such darkness. I looped backwards and tried to find a smal er road, but there was no way around. In a roadside petrol station I made inquiries of an old man who said that there were roads that would lead me over the mountains, but I would surely perish. The safest way to get through the tunnel was with the Lastwagenfahrer, the truck drivers.
They lined up behind the petrol station and talked across from truck to truck in languages as coarse as they were varied. I was not sure if they would look kindly on a Romani woman traveling alone, but the truth is that I was so deeply scared of the tunnels I would have done anything to avoid walking through them. For two days I turned and returned to that station before I bought myself, to my shame, a bottle to put me under a spel . The bottle was labeled with green vines and tasted of cough mixture, but it gave me courage to walk in amongst the drivers time after time. I climbed into the trucks, brought my knees to my chest, stared straight ahead. There were many tunnels, of course. Often they were only just being built and we would sit for hours, but the drivers, up until the last, were good to the core. They gave me cigarettes and sometimes the last of their food. They showed me pictures of their children and one al owed me to take the smal statue he cherished of Saint Jude. Later I sold it, to my shame, for food.
At the end of each tunnel I got out of the truck to clear my head and bid goodbye to the men who often told me
