Zoli

And she does like it, she thinks, it has force and power, decency, respect, al the things she has ever wanted for her daughter. The wheel on the front of the flier has been distorted so that a Romani flag, a photograph of an empty parliament, and a young girl dancing appear through it. The edge of the flier is blurred, distorted, and the colors are lively. She bends down, picks it up, knows her daughter feels heartened. She flips it open and sees a series of names, times, rooms, a schedule for dinners and receptions. She wil not, she thinks, go to any of these.

In the flier there are photographs of speakers, one a Czech woman with high cheekbones and dark eyes. The thought of it gaffs Zoli a moment—

a Czech professor, a Rom—but she does not let on, she closes the flier, clenches at a bump in the road, and says: “I can't wait.”

“If you speak I could arrange something, on gala night, maybe, or the last night.”

“I'm not made for galas, Franca.”

“One time you were.”

“I was once, yes, one time.”

The car winds out to the suburbs of Paris and in the distance she can see a number of smal towers. She recal s the time she stood on the hil with Enrico, overlooking the landscape of

Bratislava. She feels, tenderly, the touch of him, inhales his smel , and sees—she does not know why—the ends of his trousers napping in the wind.

“This is where you work?”

“We've a clinic out here.”

“These people are poor,” says Zoli.

“We're building a center. We've got five lawyers. There's an immigration hotline. We get a lot of Muslims. North Africans. Arabs too.”

“Our own?”

“I have a project going in the schools in Saint Denis, one in Montreuil as wel . An art thing for Romani girls. You'l see some of the paintings later, I'l show you.”

They park the car in the shadows of the towers. Two young boys rol a car tire along a pavement. The ancient games don't change, thinks Zoli. A number of men stand brooding against the gray metal of a shuttered shop, brightened with graffiti. A cat stands high-shouldered and alert in the shop doorway. An older boy hunches down into his jacket, aims a kick at the cat, lifts it a couple of feet in the air, but it lands nimbly and screeches off. The boy raises the flap of his jacket and then his head disappears into the cloth.

“Glue,” says Francesca.

“What?”

“He's sniffing glue.”

Zoli watches the young man, breathing at the bag, like the pulse of a strange gray heart.

A thought comes back to her: Paris and its wide elegant avenue of sound.

They link arms and Francesca says something about the unemployment rate, but Zoli doesn't quite hear, watches instead a few shadows appear and disappear on the high balconies of the flats. She smoothes down the front of her dress as they walk across a stretch of scorched grass towards the door of a low office building propped on cinder blocks. The door is locked with a metal bar. Francesca flips out a key and fumbles at the lock, opens it, and the door swings open when the metal bar is pressed. Inside there is a row of smal cubicles with a number of people working in them, mostly young women. They raise their heads and smile. Her daughter cal s for a security guard at the far side of the cabin to go and lock the outside door.

“But how do we get out?” asks Zoli.

“There's another door. He guards that one, and we lock the front one.”

“Oh.”

She hears the clicking of computer keyboards die down and sees a number of people rising from their desks, their heads popping above the low corkwood wal s.

“Hi, everyone!” shouts her daughter. “This is my mother, Zoli!”

And before she can even take a breath there are a half dozen people around her. She wonders what she should do, if she should hold her dress and bow, or whether she might have to kiss them in the French way, but they extend their hands to shake hers and it seems that they are saying how nice it is to final y meet her, finally like a very smal blade between her shoulders, she intuits it from the Italian, and she hardly knows in what language to speak back. They crowd her and she feels her heart going way too fast. She looks around for her daughter, but can't find her, in the faces, how many faces, Lord how many faces, and the word eiderdown slides across her mind, she does not know why, she feels her knees buckle, she is on a road, she is around a corner, but she catches herself, shakes her head, returns, and suddenly her daughter is there, holding her aloft, saying: “Mamma, let's get you some water, you're pale.”

She is brought across to a brown swivel chair. She leans back in it: “I'm al right, it's just been a long journey.”

And then she wonders, as she takes the glass of water, in which language she has said this, and what, if anything, it has meant.

“This is my cubicle,” says Francesca.

Zoli looks up to see photographs of herself and Enrico, standing in the val ey on a summer afternoon. She reaches out to touch his face, dark with sun. There is also one of Francesca as a child of eight, a kerchief on her hair, standing outside the mil house, the turn of the wheel slightly blurred.