On the far side of the room a pale face comes forward into the light.
“In the reception,” the journalist says, or seems to say, but his voice feels blown sideways, past her, beyond. It is as if there is a rush of air at her ears, the words make no sense, they are just bits and pieces. The journalist leans forward, earnest and podgy-eyed, his breath stale with cigarette smoke: “I met him today.”
He goes to his knees in front of her, arm on her chair, and she can feel the weight of his other hand on her wrist.
“Ms. Novotna?” he says.
She rises to her feet and there across the room, standing like a silent sadness sunk down, is Stephen Swann, staring back at her.
Zoli thinks a moment that she must be wrong, that her mind has slipped an instant, that she has found his face in someone else, that the mention of his name has brought his face to another, that the dizziness has misled her, that time has just shifted and fractured and landed in shards. The man—is it Swann?— looks directly across at her, one hand down by his side, a wooden cane in the other. He is dressed in a fine gray suit. His hair, or what remains of it, is gray. A shiny bald pate in the middle. Heavy lids frame his eyes. His face is thin, his brow furrowed. He does not move.
Zoli looks about her for some escape. Her breath sounds to her like someone drowning. She casts about for her daughter again, grasps the back of the empty chair. Go away, she thinks. Please go away. Disappear. The music from the stage is loud, powerful, and the extended pul of a bow across a violin makes her shiver.
“If you'l excuse me,” she says to the journalist.
“I was just wondering if we could have a word—' I must go.
“Later perhaps?”
“Yes, yes, later.”
The man across the room—it is Swann, she is sure of it— has begun to move in her direction, stiff and lopsided on the cane. His body moves in the folds of the suit, which creases and uncreases, like some strange gray animal.
“Al of us, we'l get together,” says the journalist.
“Of course, yes.”
“We'l meet here?”
She stands suddenly and faces the journalist, stares into the round outline of his face, and says sharply: “You must excuse me, please.”
From the corner of her eye she watches Swann, his neck a sack of sag, vanishing into the folds of the jacket. She thinks for a moment of curtains disintegrating on a rail. “Don't come here,” she whispers. She pushes the high back of a chair out of her way. Three tables away. “No.” She grabs the cloth of her dress and bundles it in her fingers. “Disappear,” she says quietly. “Leave.” Two tables, and then he is standing in front of her and he says his name, quietly, softly, “Stepan,” as if he is final y and entirely Slovak, as if he always has been, but then he corrects himself, maybe remembering something so old it has been carved from a tomb: “Stephen.”
“I know who you are,” she says.
“Zoli, can we sit?”
She wants, in that instant, nothing more than a wicker chair faced to the sunset in the val ey and to grow old and dead, that's what she wants, she would like to be in the val ey on that brown wicker chair, yes, dying in the shadow of Enrico.
“No,” she says.
Swann tries what surely wants to be a smile, but is not. “I can't tel you how… I am… I…,” he says, as if he is trying to recal a Slovak word he might never have known. “So happy.” His words make a hol ow imitation of his face. He takes a pen from his pocket and stares at it, nervously inverting it, his pale hands twitching. “I thought something had happened to you, I thought maybe you were, I thought maybe, al these years … it's so good to see your face, Zoli, so very good. May I sit, please, may we sit? How did you—” No.
“I want to say something. Please.”
“I know what you want to say.”
“I have something I've wanted to say for years. I thought you were—”
“I know what you thought.”
He clears his throat as if to speak again, some knowledge, some good word, but it does not come, it seems caught in his throat, and he cannot disguise his shaking. He lowers his head and his eyes accumulate shadow.
She steps sideways and she does not know why or from where, but in her hand she has picked up a smal metal spoon. She thinks of placing it back on the nearby table but she doesn't, she pockets it, and she is sure then the waiters are watching, or the journalist, or the security guards, and they have seen her, she has stolen a spoon, that they wil come across, accuse her, they wil grab her forearm, say, Excuse me, come with us, show us the spoon, thief, liar, Gypsy. She can hear the thump of Swann's cane behind her. In front of her, a thick crowd—the young Croatian poet surrounded by women, the workers from her daughter's office. Swann shuffles behind her. The sound of his cane.
She would like the people to part like water but she cannot get through, she must tap them on the shoulders. They turn and smile and their voices sound to Zoli as if they're speaking from inside a tree. She slides past, her nerve ends stripped clean.
At the far side of the room, Francesca watches, a smal frown on her face, confused, but Zoli shakes her head, gives a wave, as if she is al right, not to worry, chonorroeja, I'l be okay. She pushes the last chair aside. Out the door, into the corridor, fast now, around the corner.
He's gone bald, she thinks. Old and bald and wearing a suit a size too big. Liver spots on his hands. White knuckles. A silver-tipped cane.
