that I could go further with them if I wanted. But my spirit had been put in my feet, chonorroeja, and I felt safe there, and wanted to walk again, and I thought, Am I cursed to this?
I kept my head down and for the most part I stil stayed in the val eys and slept in the abandoned sheds down on the val ey floor. At times I balanced on narrow tree trunks laid across streams so I could find shelter in a light forest. When I approached the tunnels I bought myself a bottle and went then to wherever the trucks might stop.
It seemed to me that there were two different worlds, that of trees and that of engines: one seemed clear, the other dark.
Sometimes when I got to a vil age there would be a few of our own people on the outskirts. For my own safety—I did not want to talk to my own for fear of pol uting them—I could easily shoo the children off with curses. I remember, though, a settlement on the edge of a smal town in the plains beneath the central Alps. A few young boys could be seen through the low trees. I did not want to be seen by any adults, but a woman came over from a wel carrying water and she greeted me first in German and then Romani. Her dialect was hard to fathom, but in her delight she dropped the bucket and blessed me three times and then took me to their camp. I could not get away, she had such a grip on my arm. The children danced around me, tugging at my clothes. I became so caught up with them that I sprinkled a metal sheet with a pile of sand and used a saw to show them how the sand jumped. They giggled and rol ed about in joy. The women cooked me potato pancakes and fil ed my cup with fruit juice, I tel you the truth, there was never such generosity.
Five girls were brought out to dance. They wore identical green dresses with corded sashes of white tied around the waist. Listening to the music, I was happy, but imagine my raw fear, daughter, when they announced that there were three of our own from near Trnava who had been staying with them for some years now. They would be back in the evening from their work in an automobile factory. I tried to break away but could not, the force of their friendliness was too strong. They even gave me some old clothes and washed my own for me. I feared for the evening and, sure enough, when the men came along, the first word that came out of their dark mouths was Zoli.
Nobody had cal ed me this name in such a long time that it had the strength of a slingshot.
And yet they did not cower or retreat, nor spit or curse me. Instead they raised my name to the air. They were of settled folk from out near the chocolate factory, but they had left shortly after the war. They had seen me singing a few times but did not know of my time as a poet. It was soon clear to me that they knew nothing of what had happened in the judgment, nor even what occurred in the last few years to our people, the resettlement, the laws, the burnings. They had been turned back at the border several times now, these men. They stil knew routes across the Danube, they would get back eventual y to Slovakia they said, there was no other place they wanted to be. One always loves what is left behind—
and I feared I would break their hearts if I were to tel them the truth about what had been done to our people, although I knew that sooner or later in the evening the questions would come to me, deep hard questions that I would be cal ed on to answer.
The mind can do anything it wants. Al along I had blocked out song, it was a denial that came from deep inside. The choice to forget is a way of surviving. Yet at that moment I knew that, to survive, I had to sing once again. The people crowded around me, a lantern was turned on, bottles were passed. I knew I would never sing one of the songs I had written down—that was the pact I had made with myself—but I could sing the old songs, the ones I had known as a child. I took a deep breath. The first notes were awful. The people cowered. Then I relaxed and I felt the music move through me.
It brought a sharp knife to my heart and yet what was I to do? How many smal betrayals would there be for me? It is rules not mirrors that steal away our souls.
They danced that night, the firelight catching the red thread in their black dresses. In the morning, when I stole away, I al owed myself to sing a few of the songs as I went. They surprised me with their beauty and carried me along. Once or twice I would hear some of my own songs in my head, those I had written down, but I forced them out, I did not want them.
The road hooked west. A family stopped for me and the man jerked his thumb and told me to get into the back with his children. The children unrol ed the window and I felt the warm wind blowing on my face. There were nose prints of a dog on the rear window, but no animal. I did not ask, though I could see tearmarks on the faces of the children, and I had an idea that they had lost their pet. Red, I thought. To gladden them I began to hum the tune of the old horse song. The man turned in his seat and gave a smal smile, though the mother kept looking straight ahead. I sat back and hummed some more and he said he liked the humming and I surprised myself with song. My voice tipped out into the wind and back over the hundreds of roads I had already traveled.
When the man dropped me off outside a cafe the children cried, and the mother gave me money. The father pinched his hat by the crown, tipped it to me and said that he always had a warm heart for the outdoor life. In the tanned leather of his face, he smiled.
You sing wel , he said to me.
I had not heard these last words in such a long time and I mouthed them in the distance as I left the town for the hinterland. Later I sat, lit myself a fire, and watched the riverspiders on the water. They moved quickly across the surface, uncanny, ancient, leaving no circles nor ripples, as if they were part of the water itself.
It was many days later, and some towns further on, that I met my final truck driver.
He pul ed the truck over to the side of the road, near a laneway, where some boys were playing, and said that a little kiss would not go astray. I said to him that I would tel him his fortune, but he said to me that he knew it already, it was plain to see, it was there in front of his eyes, it involved a little kiss. His face was greasy and shining with sweat. When my hand hit the doorhandle he grabbed the other and he said yet again that a little thanks was needed. I yanked the handle but he clamped hard on my neck and pushed me down, his thumbs deep in the hol ow of my throat. I prayed for al my strength and hauled back my fist and blackeyed him, but he just laughed. Then he gritted his teeth and hit my forehead with his.
Things went black. I saw myself then as Conka's mother, her fingernails as they were pli-ered out. He ripped al
