“Hey, Gyp.”
A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hil , four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.
The other children top the hil and cal back to him. He lets out a long arc of spit which lands a meter in front of her, then turns and gal ops up the slope.
They wil bring back the adults, thinks Zoli. Cite me for trespassing. Bring a sergeant to arrest me. Fingerprint me. Find out who I am. Take me back to the city. Place me in front of my people again, shame me, humiliate me. Banish me once more.
She scrambles across the pipes and up the hil , each step a half-step backwards into the last.
A wooden stake scrapes her ankle and she stops in midfur-row, looks up, catches sight of a wooden roof. So here I am. I have walked al day and have come ful circle, and am back in the vineyard once again. I could just as easily be anywhere else. I have spent another day walking, and what else is there to do? Nothing else. If there has been a pencil beneath me it would have made great, useless circles.
She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the smal round scorch mark of her fire from the night
before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a smal light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swol en terribly.
The whole of her right cheek is puffy, her neck bloated, her right eye almost shut. I must deal with the tooth now. Be done with it. Pul it out.
In a corner she finds a single boot, the lace stil intact. It is against al custom to touch the boot, another smal betrayal, unclean, taboo, but she yanks at the lace until it pul s through, scattering smal flakes of dried mud. She rubs the lace in her fingers to warm it, holds it beneath the dripping pipe to moisten the fabric. She makes a loop in the string, reaches into her mouth, hooks the tooth and draws in a sharp breath, yanks hard upwards, tries not to dry-heave. She feels the roots being dragged up from the bottom of her jawbone. Eyes ful of tears. Blood fal ing now from her mouth to her chin. She wipes it away, head to her shoulder, closes her eyes, hauls again. Darkness.
The tooth rises and tears and for a moment she sees little Woowoodzhi, feverish against a tree, a nail perfectly inserted between his handbones, and he is gone, then back again, feverish once more, and she tugs harder, his smal face dissolving.
A sound rips through her jawbone like the tearing of paper, and the tooth lifts.
In the morning she feels for the gap with the edge of her tongue. The wound is large and she wonders if she should try to sear it shut, sterilize it with her lighter. She rises to rinse her mouth out in the trickle from the tap. She lifts the tooth from the sink, dark and rotten at its base, the roots clotted and fibrous.
On the wal above the sink, there is a perfect trapeze of light from the rising sun. She watches it crawl, like something breathing, until another long shadow passes within the box of light, and Zoli drops the tooth with a clank.
A farmer stands in the field outside, the rheumy-eyed dog at his heels. A face like a Hlinka guard: thick eyebrows and smal eyes and a neck with skinfolds. A long burlap sack lies at his feet; a shotgun clasped alongside his leg. He taps the gun against his high rubber boots, then hitches it to his waist and steps forward, moves out of the range of the window.
Zoli hears the clicking of dog nails, the turn of a boot at the entrance. She waits for him to come in, push the door open, put the shotgun to her neck and take her while the dog watches. The same dog, she thinks, that nosed in my own filth. She slides to the floor, brings her knees to her chest, tries to hold her breath. No movement, no sound, and she goes to the doorway. Her fingers reach around the frame and she pushes it gently, waits for the click of the gun or the thud of his fist in her face. The door swings open further and she peers around the frame.
Smal acts of kindness.
Outside, the farmer has left two bread rol s and a tin cup, half-fil ed with black tea. So what if others have drunk from it? I wil drink it anyway. She picks it up and sips, and for a split second she wonders if it has, perhaps, been poisoned.
She drinks the rest quickly, tucks the tin cup into the pocket of her skirt, touches the bread against her lips and inhales its freshness.
From the window, the farmer and dog are nowhere to be seen. Zoli rips a chunk of the bread and puts it in her mouth, then tongues it into her gum to soak up the last of the blood. At the window, only the same emptiness of trees and vineyard. She wipes a coatsleeve across her brow. Her forehead is dry and un-fevered now, and in the shard of mirror her face has already begun to lose its swel ing. Did I walk al day yesterday or did I just dream it? She digs deep in the fabric of her pocket, finds a pine nut and rol s it in her palm. In what sort of chance universe have I been brought back to a place where there is a waterpipe and a loaf of bread? In what curious conjunction of fever and road have I been al owed such generosity?
She eats half the farmer's bread and places the remainder in her zajda. Then, with a start, she remembers the rats: they wil nibble right through the cloth to get at the least crumb. Zoli shunts upwards with one foot on the windowframe and places the remaining bread on a crossbeam. She pushes it further along the beam with a twig. No good, she thinks, the rats wil fol ow from beam to beam, she has seen their like before. She goes up on her toes and knocks the bread down from the beam. With her headscarf, Zoli loops what is left of the loaf, then reaches up to tie the strange-looking bundle from an iron nail in the ceiling beam.
For a long time she wil recal herself by this: the loaf of bread, the ancient scarf, the spin of both in the air.
Years ago Conka got hold of a radio, one that used a wind-up handle. It worked for no more than thirty seconds at a time and then the signal faded, but in the middle of a wet afternoon, when the kumpanija was traveling near Jarmociek, a recording came over the radio, a broadcast from Prague. The horses were hauled short near a smal stream and were taken to be watered. Everyone sat listening to the radio, silent while Conka's husband wound the handle and Zoli's voice came through.
Later, while the horses were shaking out their manes, the youngest, Bora, climbed up on Zoli's lap and asked how was it possible for her to be in both places, inside the radio and on the road, at the exact same time. She had laughed then, they al laughed, and Conka pushed her fingers through Bora's hair. But something lay behind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other.
She wakes to the smal est one turning, face twitching. The other fol ows, fluent, waterlike. Nose to the floor, it whips across the boards to join its mate, both grown bold. Zoli backs into the corner and throws twigs across the floor, then builds three smal makeshift fires in a ring around her, flings lit pine needles towards the rathole.