I extended my hand for her to shake, but she did not take it. She stepped beyond the threshold only when Stränsky beckoned, and went to the table where he had already taken a bottle from his jacket.
“Comrade,” she said, nodding at me.
Stränsky had found Zoli, by chance, outside the Musicians Union and he had been given permission, through one of the elders, to talk to her about her songs. They were a secretive bunch, the Gypsies, but Stränsky had always been able to comb people out of themselves. He spoke a little Romani, knew their customs, how and where to tread, and he was one of the few they trusted. They also owed him a couple of favors—during the national uprising, he had commanded a regiment that had a few Gypsy fighters, in the hil s, and had, by al accounts, saved some of them with the aid of a few bottles of penicil in.
The afternoon returns to me now as a step back into what we al once believed: revolution, equality, poetry. We pul ed up chairs to the table and sat for hours, the clock ticking away. Zoli kept her head slightly bent, her glass untouched in front of her. She rattled off a few verses of the older songs. The words were in Slovak, but there was a touch of wildness to them: she wasn't used to speaking them aloud, she ‘d always sung them.
Her style was to quietly build layer upon layer until, by the end, the songs became sad and declamatory, tales of bitterness and treachery, the verses repeated over and over, like the fal ing and layering of so many leaves. When she was finished, Zoli locked her knuckles and stared straight ahead.
“Good,” said Stränsky, rapping on the table.
She looked upwards as a bird feather fel from the ceiling and spun silently down to the floor, then smiled as she watched the pigeons fly around the ceiling beams; some of the birds were darkened with ink.
“Do they get out?”
“Only to shit,” said Stränsky, and she laughed, picked the feather up, and, for whatever reason, put it in the pocket of her overcoat.
I didn't know it then, but there'd only ever been a few Gypsy writers scattered across Europe and Russia before, and never any who were part of the establishment. It was an oral culture, they had no books or written-down stories to speak of, they distrusted the unchangeable word. But Zoli had grown up with a grandfather who had taught her how to read and write, an extraordinary thing among her people.
Stränsky ran a journal, Credo, in which he was always trying to push the limits: he was known for publishing daring young Socialist playwrights and obscure intel ectuals and anyone else who vaguely amplified his beliefs. I was there to translate whatever foreigners he could get his hands on: Mexican poets, Cuban Communists, pamphlets by Welsh trade unionists, anyone whom Stränsky saw as a fel ow traveler. Many of the Slo-vakian intel ectuals had already moved north to Prague, but Stränsky wanted to stay in Bratislava where, he said, the heart of the Revolution could be. He himself wrote in Slovak against the idea that a smal er language was useless. And now, with Zoli, he thought he'd come upon the perfect proletarian poet.
He clapped his hands and clicked his fingers: “That's it, that's it, that's it.” Leaning back in his chair, he twirled the tiny peninsula of hair in the center of his forehead.
Zoli improvised as she went along—he'd ask her to repeat a certain verse so he could transcribe it, and the verse would shift and change. It seemed to me that her words contained simple, old-fashioned sounds that others had forgotten or didn't know how to use anymore: trees, pooh, forest, ash, oak, fire. Stränsky's hand rested on his leg, where he held a glass of vodka. He bounced his knee up and down, so when he final y stood up and went to the window there were dark stains on his overal s. Late in the afternoon, when darkness lengthened across the floor, Stränsky extended a pencil. Zoli took it gingerly, put the end of it against her teeth, and held it there, as if it were describing her.
“Go ahead,” said Stränsky, “just write it down.”
“I don't real y create them on the page,” she said.
“Just scribble the last verse, go on.”
Stränsky tapped his knuckles on the edge of the table. Zoli turned the thread on a button. Her lip was bitten white. She lowered her gaze and began to write. Her penmanship was shabby and she had little idea about line breaks, capitalization, or even spel ing, but Stränsky took the sheet and clutched it to his chest.
“Not bad, not bad at al , I can show this to people.”
Zoli pul ed back her chair, bowed slightly to Stränsky, then turned to me and said a formal goodbye. Her kerchief had slipped back on her head and I noticed how pure the parting was in her hair, how dark the skin between two sets of darkness, how straight, how clean. She readjusted the scarf and there was a flash of white from her eyes. She stepped towards the door, and then she was gone, out into the street in the last of the light, under the trees. A few young men on a horsecart were waiting for her. She put her nose to the horse's neck and rubbed her forehead along the top of its spine.
“Wel , wel , wel ,” said Stränsky.
The horsecart went around the corner and away.
I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck in my chest.
The next day Stränsky and I were invited to an air show for journalists on the outskirts of Bratislava: three brand-new Meta-Sokols, high-technology jets, were on display. Their noses were pointed westward. It was stil a no-fly zone around Bratislava, and the pilots had been forced to drive the jets into the airfield on huge trucks, which had become bogged down and had to be pul ed onto the field with ropes. Stränsky had been asked to write an article about the Slovak-born fighter pilots. He slinked around the machines with a general who lectured us earnestly about landing patterns, high-range radar, and ejector seats.
After the lecture, a young woman from the air force strode out to the planes. Stränsky nudged me: she had a stil ness at her center that might have been cal ed poise, but it wasn't, it was more like the tension that can be seen in tightrope walkers. Her blond hair was cut short, her body slim and winsome. He fol owed her up into the cockpit of one of the machines and they sat for a while, chatting and flirting, until she was cal ed away.
The journalists and dignitaries watched the thin sway of her as she climbed down. She reached up and helped Stränsky to the ground. “Wait,” he said. He kissed her hand and introduced me as his wayward son, but she blushed and shimmied off, with just one look over her shoulder—not at Stränsky, nor at me, but at the military jet stuck in the grass.
“Hey-ho, the new Soviet woman,” said Stränsky under his breath.
We walked across the airfield, through the giant muddy marks made by the trucks. At the field's edge Stränsky stopped and wiped some of the muck off his trousercuffs. He turned, rubbed one shoe against the other and said, suddenly, as if to the trampled grass: “Zoli.”
He hitched up his trousers and walked over the tire marks. “Come on,” he said.
Out past Trnava, towards the hil s, along a dirt road, through an isolated copse of trees. I clung on as Stränsky brought the motorbike to a skidding stop and pointed to a series of broken twigs arranged to mark a trail.
“Around here somewhere,” he said.
The engine of the Jawa sputtered. I hopped off. Smoke rose from some distant trees and a series of shouts rang out. We pushed the motorbike into the center of a clearing, where intricately carved caravans stood in a semicircle. Light came through the high pines, creating long shadows.
Young men stood by a fire. One turned an axehead with a pair of tongs; another blew a bel ows. A number of children darted towards us. They climbed on the bike and yelped when their bare feet touched the hot pipes. One jumped on my back and slapped me, then yanked my hair.