He smiled and she approached their table, petted Zemun's muzzle with a distracted hand, her eyes still on Fyodor's. Excuse me, she said. Do I know you from somewhere?"
He nodded. I was rude to you and your bear. And I painted your picture."
The expression of her face did not change, but it was as if her soul suddenly drained out, leaving behind a perfect but lifeless and brittle replica of her face. What are you doing here? she said. I thought I left you behind."
He nodded. You did. I was looking for you, to tell you I was sorry. Have you been underground long?"
"Ever since I gave my luck away. She pointed at the gold chain around his neck.
"You can have it back if you want. He felt curious stares from Galina and Elena on him, and wished that the girl would just sit down.
She shook her head. I can't. Once you give it away you can't get it back."
"I'm sorry, he said. Why did you give it to me?"
She finally sat, wedging between him and Elena. She looked at him as if from a great distance of time and lived experience that separated them. I just wanted someone to like me."
He laughed, surprised. Like you? How could anyone not like you?"
"You didn't, she said, and gave a long sideway look at Galina.
"I was young and stupid."
She looked down at her hands, smiling a wan smile. Then so was everyone else."
"What about your tabor? he said.
"That's the thing, she said. You always treated us like vermin and told us to stick with our own kind. We were never people to you, we were rats who should be grateful for your scraps and who are run out of town the moment you decide you're uncomfortable with our presence or you need someone to blame for a drought or an epidemic."
Fyodor wanted to argue, but he remembered his own fears and forbidden interest, the expression on his mother's face when she told him that gypsies would steal him. He nodded instead.
Sovin looked up from his table, where he was engrossed in a game of checkers with another old man, and waved. Oksana waved back, smiling. Where are your rats? she yelled over the din of the pub.
"Right here, Sovin answered, and several rats scurried from under the table and ran over to Oksana, climbing on her long skirt, racing to be first on her lap.
She petted them as if they were cats. My friends, she told Fyodor.
"I can see that, he answered. Do they do tricks?"
"Some, Oksana said. I'll show you when there are more around-they work better in groups."
The rats settled, sniffing at Oksana and sometimes turning to Fyodor, testing his scent with their whiskers; they smelled Oksana's luck on him.
"You want to go for a walk? he said, just to get away from the acute discomfort that intruded upon his idyll.
"Sure, she said. Do you mind if the rats come too? They need exercise."
"Not a problem. He nodded to Galina. I won't be long. Hope your cop friend finds something."
She nodded, without looking up, and Elena twined her arm around Galina's shoulders, whispering quick reassurances in her ear.
It was dark outside, and glowtrees dimmed, flashed and sparkled with seconds of brilliance, and dimmed again.
White jackdaws and rooks slept in the branches, their heavy beaks tucked under their wings, and only occasionally a ruby eye opened to give the passing people and rats an indifferent look and closed again, filming over with leathery eyelids.
"Did you want to ask me something? Oksana said.
He nodded. I want to know how you got here-and you know, what it was like for you. On the surface."
Oksana knew the sense of misplacement before she could talk. As long as she could remember, she knew moving trains and changing landscapes, with the only constant of women sitting on their parcels, and children crying and playing under the wary eyes of their mothers.
She was lucky, she said, when her family received reparations from the Holocaust-an event she had a vague concept of, but because of it money was sent by some foreign humanitarian agency, and it was because both of her maternal grandparents had perished in a gas chamber. But the money was good, and they bought a house-a shack with no running water or indoor plumbing, but still a real house where they could stay in one place and Oksana could attend school. This experience only increased her confusion-other children asked her questions that had never occurred to her, and she struggled for answers.
She had to explain that she was a gypsy and that gypsies spoke a legitimate language, not any thieves argot. She explained that her mother really could tell people's fortunes. That the movies about gypsies really weren't that accurate, and the songs that sold on shining black vinyl records, even though they were called Gypsy Romances were neither. And with every question the distance between her and her classmates grew. She started to hate her Ukrainian name, given to her because she was born in Kiev.
Then the money ran out, and they joined their old tabor again. Her mother ailed and told fortunes increasingly bizarre and dark; Oksana had to find a source of income more substantial than what walking the bear on a leash could provide. She started doing private parties at expensive restaurants, where she danced and played her guitar and sang the Gypsy romances. These songs were just like the real ones, with the point and the soul taken out of them-she could not understand why it was necessary to kill the germ of something alive and genuine in everything intended for mass consumption. It was the same with matryoshkas, the dumb soulless chunks of wood which enterprising artists sold everywhere; it was the same with sex.
They needed the money, but at first she balked when at the parties one or the another drunk businessman, red and sweating, his jacket unbuttoned and his tie long gone, asked her if she had lice and when she answered in the negative offered her a thin stack of large bills for something extra. Eventually, she could not afford to say no, and really, it wasn't that bad, just follow them to the bathroom or the backroom, close your eyes, chew your lip, and really, how was that different from what Fyodor was doing, selling her painted and repainted picture, her features just a smudge of dusky skin and black eyes and red lips, blurred by repetition of the movement, how was that different? How was that different from a cracked needle wearing a groove through old vinyl, going round and round and never arriving, how was that different from the birch stump spinning under the sharp incisor of the carver's knife until it acquired the pear shape of the stupid nesting doll?
The world spun them all around, in circles that bore an illusory similarity to spirals, until they were worn and stripped of all identifying features, like her coin, like a lollypop in a greedy child's mouth. She span in the dance, her skirt flying about her in a brightly desperate circle, she sang, she took it from behind, all accompanied by a dreadful feeling of being hurled into the gray void of an empty October sky.
She only felt balanced that day on the bridge, when on a whim she peered over the angular shoulder of the man with a notepad and saw the bridge and the church across reflected in paper just like the water reflected them-the same yet different, not defiled but honored. And right then, she wanted to see herself as he saw her, as others couldn't.
And when he painted her, she felt real. She felt less like an assemblage of exotic features but a primal creature of color and light, of primal planes and sharp angles. She was broken down and reconstructed on paper, not quite herself, but real, with the gravity her actual body lacked, free of binding spirals and the sandpaper fists of the world.