morning I was caught by the oldest woman, we cal ed her Barleyknife because of the scar on her breast. She slapped me nine times. I walked over to the fence, my face stinging. She tied back her hair with a clothes peg and shouted after me: You'l learn to marry the butcher's dog, wait ‘til you see, mark my words, you'l marry the butcher's ugliest dog.
Rain dripped off the slanted school roof, down the window-pane. The teacher smel ed of lye. Her neck was goose-white and she wiped chalk from the board with her elbow. My knees kept bumping against the top of the desk. I wore a blue skirt with white polka dots and a fril ed hem.
Across the room, the older gadzo boys were able to spit silently through the gaps in the front of their teeth. Soon one side of my hair was soaking wet with spittle, but I did not turn. I think they expected me to shout, but I did not. They whispered an old rhyme at me, saying:
The older children shouted at my back and threw bird eggs at me. I picked up the shel s and put them in my dress pocket. I tucked the book in the hedges near the school and covered it with leaves. When I got back to camp I held out my hand ful of birdshel . The women were delighted, even Barleyknife, she said that maybe school wasn't so bad after al , and she went off to paint her fingernails blue, though she also painted the nails on her feet—that was one difference between the Slovaks and Polish, we kept our feet unpainted and never wore rings on our toes.
One day I forgot about the rain, and the book in the hedges was ruined, al the pages were stuck together. They tore as I opened them. The schoolteacher said that I should have known better, but stil she gave me another one, wrapped this time in oilcloth.
She insisted I take a bath in her house, close to the school, every morning, though I washed in the river with Conka every day. I told her that a Gypsy girl wil bathe in running water, but not in a bath and she laughed and said: Oh, you people. She fiddled with my clothes, even gave me some she pretended were new. They were wrapped in brown paper, but I could tel they had been worn before—I saw the rol of paper and twine in the corner of her desk.
She ran her fingers hard through my hair, looking for lice, then combed paraffin through my braids and wrote a long letter to my grandfather:
Grandfather rol ed a grapevine leaf around the note and smoked it.
She talks more shit than a factory outhouse, he said.
After that, I didn't go to school for a while. Everyone was delighted, especial y Barleyknife who made up her very own song about a black girl who goes to a green schoolhouse and then becomes white, but final y on the road home she turns black again. I thought it was a stupid song, and so did almost everyone else, but Barleyknife sang it whenever she had climbed down into the bottle.
There was stil talk of punishment for my grandfather because not only did he send me to school, but sometimes he sat in the open now, reading his book. The punishment never happened, though. Vashengo's uncle stood up for him and said it was al right for one child to go to school because then we would know what was going on, not to worry, it was time to stick together, we would use it for our benefit, one day, just wait and see.
Petr, an old man with a soft handsome face, played his violin and Grandfather stood clapping his hands in the middle of the big canvas singing tent, and it seemed like everything was going to be al right.
The teacher gave me more books. Conka loved the pictures of wild animals and we snuck off and put the jaguar, the dolphin, the tiger up in the stars beside the badger and the wagon, the hen and the wheel—I had no idea then that others had different names for the stars, the plow, the hunter, the seven sisters. There was so much I had yet to see. Bit by bit, the stars turned on their sides and fel below the line of the earth.
I began at an early age to like the feel of a pencil between my fingers. Days in the caravan, I sat in silence with Grandfather as he spread his playing cards on the table. Red limped past in the muddiness outside. One morning, Grandfather sat beside me at the diamond window and looked outside and said he thought ofthat horse as a sickness he was catching. He had ridden the animal many times, and in his voice he said that he might not be able to do so too much longer. That was the way of things, he said, it was al right, he would stil always catch the sound, al he had to do was open his ears and listen, that was enough.
Red disappeared into the trees by the water. We listened to the shake of her mane and the whinny of her throat and the dip of her flank in the water. The bushes bent and the stems snapped as she returned through the mud. We harnessed her up. I stayed in the caravan as we went down the roads. I sat with my pencil, sharpening it, and I shaped to a stil ness the sound of Red's hooves in the muck outside:
Gray meadows rol ed past. Dark squares of plowed earth. Faint sounds came from the harps when we went over a bump. At night we jumped down from the carriages and swung open whatever gates we could find. Everyone gave a coin for the kerosene and Conka's uncle told great Romani tales. Often they would not stop until wel into nightfal , long ramblings about twelve-legged horses and dragons and demons and virgins and cruel aristocrats, about how the gadze blacksmiths tricked us with their molten buttons.
This I tel you, daughter: they were warm nights even when they were cold, and I recal them dearly and perhaps, in truth, they were warmer because of those that were yet to come.
We moved our kumpanija near the smal er town of Banksa Bystrica, and we were al owed to stay in the field of a man we cal ed the Yel ow Farmer. The farmer had huge yel ow boots that went up to his waist. He stamped around in them and sometimes went fishing down by the river.
Janko was four and he was found one day on the riverbank, hiding in the boots, his little head popping out of the top rim. Nearly al of him was tucked inside, only his grin could be seen, and after that we cal ed him Boot.
They were quiet moments in the Yel ow Farmer's field, but bit by bit we began to hear that terrible things were afoot in the country. The Germans didn't take over as they had in the Czech lands, but Grandfather said it hardly mattered, the Hlinkas were just like Gestapo, except they wore different badges. The war was coming our way. New laws were brought in. We were only al owed in the cities and vil ages for two hours a day, noon until two, and sometimes not even then. After those hours, no Roma man or woman was al owed in public places.
