Sometimes even the purest woman was charged with spreading infections and was thrown in prison. If a man was caught on a bus or a train, he was beaten until he couldn't even crawl. If he wandered the streets, he was arrested and sent to a workcamp to chop logs. We learned the sound of military vehicles the way we'd once learned the sound of animals—jeeps, tanks, convoys of canvas-covered trucks, we could tel which was coming around the corner. And yet we stil thought ourselves to be among the lucky ones—many of our Czech brothers streamed south with terrible stories about being marched down the many-cornered road. Everyone now listened to my grandfather at the fire. He knew what was happening from his radio, and even Conka's father went with him to the mil house where they were al owed barter for batteries.
Grandfather didn't have time to build any more wal s, he said that now everything was held together by factory cement, but if he ever built another wal he would do it his own way, and hold it together with what he cal ed cunning.
At night he turned the radio to polkas again, away from news of the war. Someone cal ed Chamberlain had become a doormat, he said.
Grandfather sat on the roof of our caravan and drank until he fel asleep under the stars. I whizzed the radio away from polkas and heard a man announce in Polish about what was happening, the same thing in Slovak too. Of course there was no Romani radio, there was not even a half-hour show, and we didn't hear news of our own people.
Who needs news, Grandfather said, when it's al around us? A pig doesn't need a gold ring in its nose to know where it is sleeping, does it?
Conka's mother went to Poprad but she got lost in the back-streets near the promenade, by the fruit market. Everyone searched for her, but she was picked up by the Hlinkas. They took her to the back of a bookshop, pushed her down on a table. They laughed at her long fingernails, said they were so lovely. One said he liked her fingernails so much that he would like to bring one of them home, maybe his wife would like to see such fine artistry. They held Conka's mother down by her shoulders. Al she could see was a very dark patch of ceiling above her head and then the room began to spin. One held her arm. Another held the pliers. The nails came out one by one, though they left one little finger alone—they said it was so she could please herself if she got a Gypsy itch.
They strung her nails on a little chain around her neck and sent her out of the bookshop into the street, where she fel . The troopers came out of the bookshop and brought her to hospital because, they said, she had grazed her knee. They said to the nurse: Take care of this woman's knee, it's very important that you fix her knee. On and on they went about her knee. The nurses lifted Conka's mother from the ground. Her hands were streaming blood.
They tried to heal her but she left as quick as she could. None of our people wanted to remain in a hospital amongst sickness and death, it was not a good place to be. Conka's father drove her home, and she lay crying in the back of the cart. Her hands were huge with white bandages that soon turned brown no matter how much she boiled them. She stayed in her caravan. Every day she took off the bandages and bathed her hands in water mixed with dock leaves, and then she pasted the stumps of her fingers with woodsap and chamomile. She stared at her hands as if they did not belong to her at al . Conka said it was not the pain that made her mother wail, but because she would never be able to pluck the harp again.
She tried the catgut strings with the stumps of her fingers, but her hands bled once more and that was it—the owls were in the sycamores, and things would never change.
The bookshop burned down. My grandfather and Conka's father came back smel ing of petrol. A feast was held. The tent rippled in the wind and my grandfather sang “The Internationale”—it was not the first time I had heard it, but now even Eliska joined in. She made a song up too:
We were in the thick of things. The axles were packed with grease and we got ready to leave our Polish brothers and sisters, although Eliska was coming with us. She had married Vashengo. Before we split, we gathered in a circle at the tent, and Grandfather told us the news: there was a new law out that said we needed licenses for any type of musical instrument, and so that would have to be the end of the harps for a while. The harps were buried in huge wooden containers that the men made out of maple trees from the Yel ow Farmer's forest. The men dug huge pits and laid the harps in the ground. We covered the ground with brambles and switched plants in the soil so that nobody could find them. Conka and I ran to the place of the burial, and she started a game where she jumped up and down on the ground and we pretended that music was coming out from the earth and that's when I put together a song in my mind, about down in the ground where the strings vibrate, I can stil to this day recal every word, the harps listening to the grass growing above them, and the grass listening back to the sounds two meters below.
We went that night from the Yel ow Farmer's place, sloshing down the bowerpaths through a mudstorm. The wheels got stuck in the puddled roads. We lifted them out and walked bowlegged for a better grip, fol owing the notched bones and bundled straw and other signs. A boy my age, Bakro, the cousin of Conka, walked alongside me. I think he already had the desire for me. He squandered his time in the mirror at the back of the caravan, fixing his black hair. A line of tanks went past and the last one stopped to search us, they didn't even clean their boots on the steps. Conka and I hid under an eiderdown, but the Hlinka who came in lifted it immediately and prodded at our dresses with his boot, then spat at us. Nothing could be worse for a Romani girl. When they left, we cal ed them pigs, lizards, snakes. They were unclean, the last of the last.
On we went, walking at the paced hol ow clop of the horse's hooves. Bakro whispered to me that he would protect me, no matter what, but my grandfather fixed an eye on us and I did not feel a sway in my bel y for Bakro the way I did for other boys.
At night, Grandfather released Red and stepped between the tongues of the carriage, hoisting it with his bare hands. He turned it slightly while I slipped smal rocks under the wheels, and in the morning we moved on again.
The radio reports came in from across what we now cal ed, once more, Slovakia—it was confusing with Bohemia and Moravia and Germany and Hungary and Poland and Russia, and so Grandfather stood up one night and said that one day it would al soon be Rromanestan or the Soviet
Russia, but someone else said that it might be America, where a very blue lady would hold a torch for us and everyone was created equal. We were moving around the country then, every week a new place, but someone, usual y Boot's father, always returned to the forest and stayed with the harps. At night he slept near them. He swore there were restless spirits who came to play.
I soon reached womanhood and had to burn the red rags. It happened in a forest of white poplars and Conka knew what was going on, she had already been through it herself. She gave me a strip of cloth to clean myself up. I was careful now where I stepped, the touch of my skirt could dirty a man. She said no matter, but be careful not to go behind the hedge with a boy, they might take advantage. Together we sewed pebbles in the hem of our dresses
