Colum McCann - Zoli

From the darkest corner of the hut, she hears a series of skittering noises. Across the narrow expanse a single brown rat looks at her with curiosity. Zoli hisses the rat away but it returns with a mate. It sits on its hindlegs, licking its forepaws. The second darts forward, stops, touches its long tail against the face of the first, draws a lazy circle with its body. Zoli hammers her sandal on the ground. The rats twitch, turn, return, but she slaps the shoe off the metal windowframe and the rats scamper to the dark corner. Zoli fumbles in the hut to collect leaves, sticks, and bits of crate. She builds them into a small teepee, shakes out the cap of her lighter, cups her hands around the kindling, blows it to flame. When the rats peek out again she slides lit spears of twig across the floor, one after the other, bouncing shards of light. The twig ends burn slowly, scorching the wooden boards.

She waits, head slumped against the wall-how strange this desire to stay alive, she thinks, how easy, with no integrity nor purity, simply a function of habit.

In the morning she wakes panicked. The rats are nowhere to be seen, though fresh pellets lie in patterns beyond her feet.

A gray reef of light climbs up and around the window. From the top of the pane to the bottom, she watches a raindrop slide. An acute wave of nausea hits her. She presses her thumb against her lower jaw. Her mouth feels riven, her jaw huge. The pain shoots along her jaw, to her neck, her shoulderblades, her arms, her fingers. She reaches for the tooth with the tip of her tongue, rocks it back and forth, waiting for the roots to snap. The tooth shifts in her gum, but does not lift. She heaves again, dryly, nothing in her stomach anymore. I have been many days on the road, she thinks, and have not eaten a single thing.

At the judgment, three nights before, the congress said that she was weak, that she did not have the strength of body or mind, and they sentenced her to Pollution for Life in the Category of Infamy for the Betrayal of Romani Affairs to the Outsiders.

She wonders now if she has discovered what it means to be blind: she can see nothing before her that she wishes to enjoy, and little behind that she cares to remember.

It happened so quickly and she accepted it without question. She was ushered into the center of the tent and made to stand. They checked for metal in her hair that might absorb the ruling. The elder krisnitoria sat in a half-ring on crates and chairs. Five coal-oil lamps were placed in a semicircle around them. They stood and invoked the ancestral dead, the lamplight flickering on their faces as each spoke in turn, an even pitch of accusation. The crossing and uncrossing of feet. The blue curl of tobacco smoke.

Vashengo stood and asked if she understood the charges. She had betrayed her people, he said, she had told of their affairs, brought unrest down upon them. He spat on the ground. He looked like a man in a state of gentle decay, water left stagnant in a pail. Zoli pinched the front of her dress, felt the weight of pebbles sewn in her hem. She talked of settlement and change and the complicated sorrow of the old days, of which she had often sung, of the hewers of tin and the drawers of water, of stencils of smoke and fire that tightened the skin, of patterns and snapped twigs, of the sound of wood against the land, of roads and signs, of nights on the hills, making from broken things what was newly required, how the gadze used words, delegations, institutions, rules, of how she had misunderstood them, how they had hastened the dark, of brotherhood, decency, tower-blocks, wandering, of how these things would be felt amongst the souls of the departed, of wisdom, whispered names, things not to be repeated, of her grandfather, how he was waiting, watching, silent, gone, of what he had believed and what that belief had become, of water turning backwards, banks of clay, snowfall, sharp stones, of how they could still only call her black even after she had been soaked in whiteness.

It was the longest speech she had ever made in her life.

A riffle of whispers went around the tent. As they conferred, Vashengo lit a cigarette with brown hands and studied the lit end deeply. Another cough and a silence. He was the one designated to speak. He still wore his cufflinks coined from red bicycle reflectors. He lit a match off his fingernail so that it looked as if fire was springing from his hand. He sat, tunneling mud from his boot with a stick, gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and blew, wiped his hand on his trousers which were lined, on the seam, with oval silver studs. He stood up, neck cords tight, walked towards her. The sound of his voice was redundant, for she knew the punishment already. Vashengo slapped her face with the back of his hand. Something gentle lay in his slap, but one of the rings on his fingers caught her jawbone. She turned her face in the direction of the blow, kept her head to her shoulder.

Nobody would ever eat with her now. Nobody would walk with her. If she touched any Romani thing it would be destroyed, no matter what value: horse, table, dish. When she died, nobody would bury her. She would not have a funeral. She could not come back, even as a spirit. She could not haunt them. They would not talk of her, they could not even mention her: she had betrayed the life and she was beyond dead, not Gypsy, not gadzi, nothing at all.

Zoli was told to close her eyes as Vashengo ushered her out of the camp. Her late grandfather's breathing came in behind her: in it, the sounds of years. The other elders did not touch her, but instead they guided her with the sound of their boots. All the children had been taken inside. She glanced at Conka's caravan, the chopped wheels making it list sideways. A corner of the curtain trembled and a half-shadow shot back. If I could take all my foolishness and put it in your hands, piramnijo, you would be bowed over for the rest of your life. None of the other women were looking out: they had been told not to, otherwise they too would feel the hand.

It was close to morning and a thin line of cloud had appeared on the eastern rim of the sky. In the distance stood a few warehouses, more stray towers, and an emptiness of hills, stretching beyond. No place seemed more or less sheltered than any other. It was then that she had begun to walk.

In the morning she stands, gripping the doorframe, staring out at the puddled vineyard, the terraced slopes, and the mist of middle-distance where a sheet of gray hangs across the low Carpathian hills. She has, she thinks, become unused to such a clean silence: only the wind and the rain and her own breathing.

For an hour she waits for the rain to slacken, but it doesn't, so she hikes her belongings, pulls her scarf over her head, and walks out into the downpour.

She stops and pulls the sleep from her eye, eats the small yellow deposit from the tip of her finger.

Close to the road, she clambers over a stone stile towards the pine forest. Raindrops bell down from the branches and fall to the forest floor. She bends to fill her skirt pockets with brittle needles, pinecones, dry twigs, and carries them all, bundled in her zajda, back towards the hut.

At the doorway she throws the bundle in a heap to the middle of the floor. She shakes the lighter for fuel-enough for a week or two perhaps-and builds the fire using broken wine-crate. When it is lit, she drops the pinecones into the flames and waits for them to crack open. She touches her swollen jaw, quite sure the seeds will break her bad tooth and dislodge it altogether, but when she bites down into one, her front tooth quivers.

I will not lose my front teeth. Of all things, I will not lose those.