Zoli

The wagon was listing sideways on the cobblestones. I went up and held on to Red's reins, rubbed against her, my ear hot against her pulsing neck. Grandfather climbed up and sat a long time, staring at the building. Final y he said: Come up here, precious heart. He lifted me up with one hand and sat me on the board beside him. He sat quiet a long time, then he spat sideways, put his arm around my shoulder, and said to me that one of the reasons he wrote XXX was that he would not let them make an idiot of him with their rules.

He took the reins in his hands and was about to slap them down on Red's rump, but then he looked back over his shoulder and whispered: Go ahead, horse, and shit. And as if by the very string of heaven, Red lifted her tail and left two steaming loads on the cobbles outside the grand white building, and we drove away laughing, we never laughed so hard. At the end of the road we looked back and saw a man lifting the clumps up on a shovel with a scrunched red look on his face. We laughed even harder until the building was out of sight and we went out on the country road with the trees in bloom and the midges rising and blue dragonflies on the air, the kind that leave the shine from their wings on the glass once you put them in a jar.

Grandfather put his hat back on his head and wound his curling mustache around his finger and said very loud again to the road: Go ahead, horse, and shit.

We fol owed signs—a knotted wishbone to turn left, a broken twig for a right fork in the road, a white cloth for a friendly farmhouse where we could water Red and fil our canteens.

It was late summer and the cherry trees were heavy and drooping. We crossed a lovely clean river and went deep into the forest where we were shielded from view by thick lines of yew, green oak, sycamore. Among the wiry grasses grew wild orchids and dandelions. Grandfather brought me into a clearing where fourteen caravans stood, they took my breath away, beautiful y colored and carved. Water came up from the ground around a piece of swampy grass. A tin cup was upended on a nubbed pole. A girl came towards us with a drink. It ran cool against the back of my throat. I watched as Grandfather took giant strides across the camp and put his arms around the shoulders of his very own brother who he had not seen in years. He shouted at me to hurry up and come meet my cousins, and cousins of cousins, and cousins of other cousins. Soon we were surrounded, and I was scooped up immediately into a new life which was so much like my old life.

A few of them had strayed down from Poland, carrying harps. I had never seen instruments so tal , beautiful y carved and strung with catgut. They stood twice my height. Even when I stretched on my toes I could not reach the top of the strings. They were varnished and carved with wheels and griffins and birds. The plucked sound carried through the trees. There was nothing so lovely. The women who played the harps had very long fingernails. They painted their nails every night, using whatever colors could be found, boiled up from animals and red riverstone and some from bird eggs, light blue. The colors were brushed on with tiny brooms made from weed- grass. Eliska, a Polish woman with hair black as thumbprints, owned a very fine enamel brush—she had found it at the back of a theater in Krakow, she said it belonged to a famous actress who could be heard on the radio. Who needs a radio when you have Eliska! she shouted.

She took my arm and walked me across the camp: You have the eyes of a little devil, she said.

She laughed and spun me round in the air and later told me to sit with her as she brushed the color onto her fingernails. Her words were quick and clipped. Eliska had fal en in love with a young man named Vashengo and soon she would marry. She said she would teach me an old song that I could sing at their wedding. Hers were the old laments I already knew, but then she taught me a new one. I will fill the empty cup, it is not so hollow anymore, I will fill it with wine, it will come from the palm of your hand. I learned it quickly and wandered around the camp singing it, until Vashengo said: Please shut up, you'l drive me to the nuthouse. I sang another verse and he clipped me on the ear. Eliska whispered to me that I was al right, not to worry, pay no attention to the men, they wouldn't know a good song if it kissed them on the lips. Come here, she said, and I'l braid your hair like your mother used to. How do you know how my mother braided my hair? I asked. It's a secret, she said. I began to cry, so she said: Oh your mother was famous for many things, most of al she was a great singer.

She leaned down to my ear and sang, and the songs grew and grew, and she took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead. Pity about your eye, said Eliska, otherwise you'd be as pretty as she was.

It was my talent that I could remember words and phrases, and so I was kept up late at night to listen to the songs. Sometimes they shifted and rol ed and changed. If the women were swaying with cucu, they could not remember where the song had led the night before. They said to me: Zoli, what did I sing? And I would say: They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. Or I would say: I have two husbands, one of them sober, one of them drunk, but each one Hove the same. Or I sang: I want no shadow to fall upon your shadow, your shadow is dark enough for me. They smiled when these words came out of my mouth and told me again that I had the look of my mother. At night I fel to sleep thinking of her. I pictured her in my mind, she had a row of perfect teeth except for a bottom one missing.

It is strange now to talk of such things, but these are the moments I remember, chonorroeja, this was my childhood, I try to tel it to you as I saw it then, and as I felt it then, when I was not yet shunned, when it was al stil free and open to me, and for the most part it was happy. The Great War hadn't yet begun and, although the fascists sometimes hunted us to give us another dose of their hatred—we were no more than wild animals to them—we settled as far away from them as possible, kept to our own ways, and made music where we could. That, back then, was enough.

In the new camp there was another girl the same age as me. Conka had red hair and freckles in a band across her nose. Her mother had sewn a string of pearls in her hair. Her dresses were threaded with silver, and she had the most beautiful voice of al , so she too was kept awake at night to sing. The canvas flap of the singing tent was pul ed back for us. We stood on buckets so we could be seen. Grandfather shoved his hat back on his head and lit up a smoke. Everyone gathered in a half circle around us. The women played the harps at a furious pace, once or twice they bent a fingernail backwards in the strings, but stil they kept going.

My voice was not as sweet as Conka's, but Grandfather said that it hardly mattered, the important thing was the right word, to pul it out, or squeeze it short, and then dress it up with air from my lungs. When we sang, Conka and I, he said that we were air and water in a pot and together we boiled.

In the nighttime, we tried to fal asleep by the fire, but our favorite stories kept us up late and when a story was real y good we had no legs to hold us up. Her father slapped us and told us to go to our beds, we'd waken the dead. Grandfather carried me and put me beneath the eiderdown where my mother had once stenciled a harp using thread that came from cottonwood trees.

One evening, Grandfather carried home a carpet of a man's face, and he hung it on the wal above the drawer ful of knives. It was a portrait of a man with a gray beard, a strange gaze, and a high forehead. It's Vladimir Lenin, he said. Don't tel a soul, you hear me, especial y the troopers if they come along. Later that week he bought a second carpet—this one was the Holy Virgin. He rol ed the Virgin into a tight circle with string, and positioned her above Lenin, so that if a stranger came into the caravan, he could reach up with his knife and cut the string and the Holy Virgin would come down on top of Lenin in a rush. Grandfather thought it hilarious and sometimes he cut the string just for fun, and if he was drunk he would talk to their faces and cal them the greatest of bedfel ows. If there