the buttons off what I wore and his hands went to my second dress and he tore that open too. It is no long story, what I tel . I watched his hands. He went soft-faced and gentle for a moment, and said: Come on, woman, one little kiss. I knew then, as he was stroking my shoulder and the side of my face, that what I had stolen was what would save me.
The blade went into his eye socket with an ease not far from butter.
I was out of the truck, hauling al that I had, and he was stumbling around, shouting the whore took my eye out, she took my fucking eye out. Indeed the knife was in his hand and his eye was a bloody mess. Some boys gathered around him and began to shout and then they pointed at me excitedly. I ran down the narrow laneway, looking for a turn. I passed a wooden shed and pul ed back one of the rotting boards, crept through. Fresh shards of wood fel to the ground where I pul ed the plank back and I knew I had left a marker for them to fol ow, but I had no time. Loud footfal s in the al eyway. Inside the shed were piles of broken slates, some farm machinery, and a blue automobile. I tested the door handles but they were locked tight. I hunkered down at the back of the car and pul ed the silver latch. The trunk flew up. I flung my bundle of possessions inside, then looked about in terror and climbed in. I held the lid of the boot so it would not close. From the shed came the ripping of a plank. The boys shouted and banged around. I heard them tug the handles and I was quite sure I was finished.
When I think of it now it was such bare stupidity, but when they left the shed—one shouting that he had seen me running across the fields—I lay back and cried, chonorroeja. Would things always be like this? I pul ed the lid of the boot down but lay part of my blanket over the latch so it wouldn't shut me in. I curled up against the dark.
In the morning, I woke as the boot-lid bounced up and down.
My ordeal with the onyx knife did not land me in prison, as you might expect. The man who found me in his car wore a smart col ar and tiepin. He stared in at me, then slammed the lid of the boot down. As we drove, I could hear him muttering amid the rattle of what must have been rosary beads. I was sure he would lead me to the courthouse, or to the officials, or to yet another camp, but when the boot was opened up, an hour or more later, a young man in a black suit and white col ar looked down on me. I blinked against the light, clutched at my torn clothes.
Al yours, said the man with the tiepin.
I was terrified, but the young priest guided me along the pebbled path towards a house. I had heard much about priests, and knew how easily they turn into bureaucrats, but something about Father Renk stopped me from running. He sat me down at a smal table in the kitchen of his house.
He was a young man, with a little badger streak of gray at the temples. He ‘d known many Gypsies in his life, he said, some good, some bad, he did not make judgments, but how in the world did I end up in the back of a motorcar? I began to invent a story but he said, sharp and sudden: The truth, woman. I told him the story, and he said that indeed the police probably were searching for me, but not to worry, I had been driven a good distance away. He had dealt with displaced persons before, in the nearby Peggetz camp.
There's a bed if you want it, he said. He showed me the stairs to a smal room at the top of the house where I would be al owed to sleep. In return I was asked to clean the floors of the church, to keep the sacristy in order, and to attend his services—simple daily tasks that were more difficult for me than they should have been. In the end I stayed for three months and I stil recal those days, how unusual they were, ful of cloths and dishes and furniture polish. For al my worldliness, the simple mechanics of a vacuum cleaner stumped me and I had never before used bleach. I made holes in the young priest's shirts. I left an iron sitting on a tea towel and burned the ironing board, but Father Renk found it al amusing. He sat in the kitchen and watched me and chuckled and once even took the vacuum himself, singing as he guided it down the hal way. There were long cold mornings spent listening to his homilies about peace—he stood at his altar and said to his parishioners that we must live together in fel owship, one and al , that it was a simple thing to do, black, white, Austrian, Italian, Gypsy, it did not matter. How little he knows, I thought, but I did not say a word, I went about my cleaning duties and kept my head low.
One night he saw me, not kneeling, but sitting at the altar. He sat across from me in the front pew and asked what it was I was searching for. To go across the mountain, I replied. He said it was a good proposition but only God knew where it would take me to. I replied that God and I were hardly friends, though the Devil seemed to like me sometimes, a notion which made him turn to the window and smile.
Over the next few days Father Renk made several phone cal s, until one morning he said to me: Pack up, Marienka, come on. Pack what? I said.
He grinned and put money in the palm of my hand, then drove me south through beautiful countryside, past vil ages where people waved at the priest's car. On the underside of a bridge was a sign:
We stopped in the little vil age of Maria Luggua where Father Renk walked the twelve stations of the cross, blessed me for my journey, and then left me in a vil age cafe with a man who hardly looked at me from over the rim of his cup.
Across the mountain? he said in German, though I could tel straightaway it was not his language.
I nodded.
There are two things in this part of the world, he said. God and money. You are lucky that you found the first.
He had never taken a person across before and he did not cherish the idea, and would only do so if I could carry a sack on my back. I knew nothing about smuggling, or contraband, or taxes, but I said I could carry my weight and more in order to get to Paris. He chuckled at me and said, Paris? Of course, I said. Paris? he said again. He could not stop himself from laughing and I thought him a detestable thing in his leather waistcoat, with his stringy hair and his lined face. It's the wrong way, he said, unless you want to climb the mountains for another year or two. He drew a map for me on the back of his hand where he showed me Paris and then he showed me Italy and then he showed me Rome. I am not a fool, I said to him. He drank his smal dark coffee and said, I'm not either. He stamped his cigarette out on the floor, rose, and didn't look back.
Down the street, he final y turned and pointed at me and told me that my luck only ran as far as my friendship with the priest.
Over the other side of the mountain and that's al . Do you understand me? he said.
Three sackloads of syringes were what he carried the night he brought me across the border. He did not, in the end, al ow me to carry anything.
