Colum McCann - Zoli

The rumors picked up speed. If I had ransomed everything and given it to her it would still never have been enough. Her people were not able to stand outside the true bend of gravity. The force was always downwards, even if the inclination was to raise them up. There was no single hour when it came about, but things had begun to slip: more talk of Law 74, the End of Nomadism, the Big Halt. Some ignored it. Others embraced it, saw it as a way to fill up their pockets and call themselves Gypsy kings, a notion that meant nothing to Zoli and her people.

The crux of the matter was assimilation, belonging, ethnic identity. We wanted them, but they wanted us to leave them alone. And yet the only way to be left alone was to let us know what their life was, and that life was in Zoli's songs.

On the motorbike, we drove east to meet with local officials in Zilina, Poprad, Presov, Martin, Spisskä Nova Ves. In town meetings she spoke about tradition and nationhood, about the old life, against assimilation. She had written down the poems, she said, in order to sing the old life, nothing more. Her politics were those of road and grass. She leaned forward into microphones. Don't try to change us. We are complete. Citizens of our own space. The bureaucrats stared at her and nodded blankly. Simply being who she was aroused an expectation among them-they wanted her in the Gypsy jam jar. They nodded and showed us the door, assured us they were on our side, but anyone could see that they were separated from honesty by fear. Nor could we be rescued by the forces of beauty around us: we clattered down the potholed roads, through valleys, beneath the snowcapped eastern mountains, in the early mornings when small house lights still dawdled by the rivers, a smoke of mayflies drifting in the air. I opened my mouth and it filled with midges.

The journey hammered me down. A deadness in my fingers. Climbing on the bike, the day seemed to stretch out, endless. Zoli carried her clothes in a zajda blanket stretched around her back, two knots tied at her chest. She had already scarred her left leg on the heat of the exhaust pipe, but she did not stop: she applied her own poultice from dock leaves. Town to town, hall to hall. In the evening, we stayed in the homes ofgadze activists. Even they had become silent. I walked around with a hollow pit in my stomach. Whole marching bands of children went through the streets wearing red scarves, shouting slogans. The loudspeakers seemed to be turned up a notch. For long stretches we found in ourselves little to say. In the corridors of community offices all over the country, Zoli tore her face down off the walls, shredded the pieces, put them in her pocket: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

We stayed one night in a monastery that had become a hotel. It was shoddy and ruined, full of plastic plants and cheap prints. The bites that woke me were from bedbugs concealed under a loose corner of wallpaper. Bells rang out in the early morning, calling workers to their jobs. I rose and washed my arms and face in the handbasin in the corridor, paid the plump woman at the front desk. She sat in a bright plastic chair and regarded me, diligently bored, though she sat upright when she saw Zoli, recognizing her from the newspapers.

As we rode from the monastery, a series of thin and trembling images caught in the rain puddles: moving feet, windows, a small slice of steel-colored sky. I had the very ordinary thought that surely there was an easier life elsewhere. Zoli and I waited for an hour to fill up the petrol tank. The motorbike was a curiosity with young children on their way to school. They were fascinated by the speedometer. Zoli lifted the children and allowed them to pretend that they were driving. They laughed and clapped as she pushed them along, school satchels slung over their shoulders, until they were shooed off by the petrol attendant.

In the evening we reached Martin, a gray little town along the Vah River. We were refused a hotel room until Zoli showed her Party card, and even then she was told that there was only one room left, though there were four single beds in it. It was on the top floor, something she always resisted unless she was sure there were no Gypsy men beneath her-every now and then she dredged up some of the ancient ways, and it was possible, in the old blood laws, to contaminate men by walking above them. She eventually managed to get a first-floor room with the suggestion that she would throw a curse on the clerk. Alarmed, he scuttled away and came back moments later with the keys. It was a form of voodoo that she used only in the worst cases. She threw her bag on the soft mattress and we left for a meeting with the local officials-three Cultural Inspectors who had formerly been priests.

All Zoli wanted to do was hold a hand up against the tide that she felt was washing over her, but Law 74 had become part of the vocabulary now; the idea was that the Gypsies were part of the apparatus. Zoli pleaded with them, but the officials smiled and doodled nervously at the edge of ledgers.

“Shit on you,” she said to them, and she walked out into the front courtyard, and sat with her head in her hands. “Maybe I should sing a song for them, Swann?” She spat on the ground. “Maybe I should jangle my bracelets?”

In the local market she came across a family of Roma who had been burned out of a sawmill and had nowhere to sleep. She brought them through the lobby of the hotel, eleven or twelve at least, not including children, and promised the clerk that they'd be out first thing in the morning. His jaw hung slack, but he allowed them to pass. In the room I set up a makeshift sheet around one bed so as not to be improper. I tried to leave so she and the family would have the room to themselves, but neither Zoli nor the others would have any of it. They insisted I stay in the bed. The women and children giggled as I undressed. My ankles were exposed underneath the hanging sheet-it was what they deemed immodest.

Part of the curtain fell aside and I watched as they gathered in the middle of the room and talked in a dialect I couldn't make out. It seemed they were talking of burnings.

When I woke I saw Zoli, in the predawn dark, climbing out the window. All the others had already gone from the room. When she returned she held in her hand a wet cloth that I assumed she must have wiped in the dew. She lit a candle, placed it in an ashtray, and curved her hand around it as if to shield the light from me. She leaned forward and let her black hair fall before her. She pressed the wet cloth along the length of it a number of times. She brushed it as many more times with a wooden comb, then gathered her hair, coiled it, braided it. The ceiling skipped with shadow. She slipped into the far bed.

When I stood up and walked over to her she did not move. She lay with her back to me, her neck bare. A draft flattened the candle flame. She allowed my arm across her waist. She said that there were many things she missed in her life, not least a sinewy voice that might come up from beneath the ice. I nudged in against her, kissed the back of her hair. It smelled of grass.

“Marry me,” I said to her.

“What?” she said, speaking towards the window, not as a question, nor an exclamation, but something distant and unfathomable.

“You heard me.”

She turned and gazed some other place beyond me.

“Haven't we lost enough?” she said.

She turned and kissed me briefly as she lowered the guillotine for a final time, and I was grateful in a way that she had waited so long. A single phrase, and yet it hit me with the force of an axe. She had put a line down between us, one I could never again cross.

Zoli rose and gathered her possessions. When she left the room, I punched into the wall and heard a knuckle crack.