Zoli

They nestle in to one another. This is what I have, thinks Zoli. This is my flesh and blood.

Onstage the Scottish musicians begin to break the skin of the evening and the music fil s the room—mandolin, guitar, fiddle. Laughter sounds out al around and movement blurs the hal . Waiters. Hotel staff. Tal men with leather patches on their sleeves.

Zoli leans back in her chair, touches her throat, and is surprised by the feel of the new necklace against her skin. She barely remembers putting it on. How long, she wonders, since she wore something like this? She closes her eyes to Enrico. He strides up the hil side, towards the mil . His coat is thrown off his shoulders before he even enters. He kicks the mud off his boots and closes the door.

Go, violin, she thinks, go.

The pulse of the music rises. Under the table, she releases one foot from its shoe. The air feels cool against her toes. She lifts off the second shoe and stretches backwards and feels a light tapping at her shoulder. A voice from behind. Her name. She turns in the chair and fumbles to get the shoes back on her feet. Her name again. She stands. He, the visitor, is fleshy, wiry-haired, mid-forties or so—something about him open and ful , a wide smile on his face. He stretches out his hand, plump and soft.

“David Smolenak,” he says. “From Presov.”

The air around her suddenly compresses.

“I do have the right person, don't I? Zoli Novotna?”

She stares at the row of pens in his waistcoat pocket.

“Are you Zoli Novotna?”

It is the first time she has heard Slovak spoken in many years. It sounds so acutely foreign now, out of place, dredged up. She has, she thinks, been transported elsewhere, her body playing games, her mind tripping her up.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Did I get the wrong person?”

She scans the room and sees the rows of faces at table after table, animated with music. She stammers, shakes her head, then nods, yes and no.

“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”

“I'm here with my daughter,” she says, as if that might account for her whole life.

“It's a pleasure,” he says.

She wonders what pleasure it could possibly be, and feels a flush of heat at her core.

“Presov?” she says, as she catches the edge of the table.

“Would you have a minute, maybe?” he asks. “I'd love to talk to you. I read your book. I found a copy in a secondhand store in Bratislava. It's amazing. I've been to the settlements, Hermanovce, places like that. They're quite a sight.”

“Yes,” she says.

He bal s up his fist, coughs into it, and says: “You're hard to keep track of.”

“Me?”

“I ran into you first when I was reading some articles about other writers, Tatarka, Bondy, Stransky, you know.”

“Yes, yes,” she says, and it feels to her as if al of the windows have been closed al at once.

“I didn't know you were going to be here,” he says, almost stuttering. “I assumed …” He laughs the sort of laugh designed to fil spaces. “If it wasn't for Stepan, I wouldn't have known anything.”

He lights a cigarette and moves his hand in a coil of blue smoke. Zoli watches the smooth trajectory of the cigarette to his lips, and the movement of his hands in the air, the quick fingers. It is as if the words come out in odd streaks from his mouth—talk of Slovakia, the plight of the Roma, what it means now to European integration, and suddenly he is in Bratislava, he is talking of a towerblock cal ed the Pentagon, graffiti in the stairwel s, dealers in the dark shadows—what sort of dealers? she wonders—and something about an exhibition, about Stransky's poems being resurrected, a strange word, she thinks, Stransky would not like it, no, the very thought of him bil owing through the gardens at Budermice, resurrected.

The journalist touches her elbow and she wants to say, No, please leave me alone, leave me be, I am in a garden, I am walking, I am not where you think I am, I am gone, but he is off again on a tangent about a poem, one of her old songs, something about the trunk of a linden tree. He was searching out Stransky, he says, and discovered Credo, and then a chapbook, they were odd, these poems, rare, beautiful, in a dusty back issue, and when he went searching for the book he was told it could be bought in the secondhand shops, there was a smal cult around it, that she is seen as a voice, a new voice from old times, and he has been looking, searching, digging, and then he says the name again, Stepan, how he helped out when he final y got in touch with him. He crushes the cigarette into a saucer on the table. The smoke rises and she watches it curl. Stepan, the journalist says yet again, and then he mentions something about a photograph taken at the piano of the Carlton Hotel, the clarity of it, the beauty, and she wants more than anything just to lean over and to pour water on the smoldering cigarette, to extinguish it, but the more she watches it the more the smoke rises in stutters.

“Swann?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Stephen Swann?”

“Yes, of course,” he says.

Zoli drags the chair across the carpet, lowers herself into it. She reaches for a glass of water, puts it to her lips. She does not know whose it was, yet she turns it a half-circle and takes a sip. Taboo to drink from someone else's glass, but the water feels immediately cool at the back of her throat.