Out and away, the country begins to rol lighter and uninhabited, and in the early afternoon she stops in the shade of an old tin shelter.
She is startled to see a group of four coming down the far side of the road. A smal shapeless mass at first, but then as they get closer the group clarifies—three children and a woman, carrying buckets and a few smal bundles, out looking for whatever food they can find. Zoli recognizes them by their walk. The children run around the woman like smal dark magnets. Two dip down into a ditch, emerge again. A shout of some sort. The figures loom like something through poor glass. The distant cal of geese above them.
One of the children darts across the road to a line of wil ows and then al three youngsters are hauled in close to Conka's dress.
A panicky claw at Zoli's throat. She grows faintly aware of a sharp odor from her body. She blinks hard. The odor worse now, her bowels loose.
Conka and her family narrow the distance. The red hair, her white skin, the row of freckles across the eyes, the scars on her nose.
The first of them is Bora. The sound of the spit comes in advance of the moment and Zoli can feel the spray in her face. She does not wipe it away. She stands, chest rising and fal ing, her heart surging under her ribcage. A roar in her ears, a splintering. Never a stil ness quite like this. The second child, Magda, is next, crossing with soft and measured steps. The spit is without sound or venom. It lands on the shoulder of Zoli's overcoat.
A muttered curse, almost an apology. She hears the girl turn slowly away—of course, her bad foot. The last is Jores, the oldest, and he leans up close, she can feel his breath on her face, the smel of almonds. “Witch,” he says. A ratcheting sound from his chest. The spit vol eys into the perfect point between her eyebrows.
Another roar from the side of the road, the arc of the voice, so familiar, cal ing the children together. Zoli does not move. She waits for Conka.
Flickering now across her mind: a hil run, a bare body dressed, laughter beneath a blanket, al those childhood things, ice across a lake, a basket of candles. Balance, she thinks, balance. In danger of losing my footing and being carried off the edge. What edge? There is no edge.
When Zoli opens her eyes the road is misted and shimmering, but there is no laughter, no shouting, no lapping echo from behind. She feels the phlegm trail along her neck. She wipes it away and bends down to the grass, passes her wet fingers along the blades. The smel of the children on her fingers.
Conka did not spit.
She did not cross the road and she did not curse me.
At least there is that.
It is almost enough.
A little further on, at the side of the road, Zoli stops short and leans down to touch a tin can—grain and old berries, a single piece of meat beside it, unspoiled. Fingers to her mouth, she inhales the smel of the younger children. I wil not cry. Only once since judgment have I cried. I wil not again.
Zoli bends down at the side of the road to lift the tin can and, beneath that, finds a hacked-off coin from Conka's hair.
THE DAYS PASS in a furious blank. The sky is wintry and fast. Soft flurries of snow break and melt across her face. She descends a steep bank towards a stream, the sun glancing off the thin ice. Whole patterns of crystals encase the river-grass. She steps to the water, sleeves her hand in her boot, and cracks the surface. She pokes around with a stick to clear the shards, touches the freezing water with her fingers.
With a deep breath she plunges her face into the water—so cold it stuns the bones in her cheeks.
Gingerly she takes off her socks. The blisters have hardened and none of the cuts have gone septic, but the makeshift bandages have become part of her skin. Zoli inches her feet into the burning cold of the water and tries to peel away the last of the bandages. Skin comes with them. Later, over a smal fire, she warms her toes, pushes the flaps of torn skin against the raw flesh, attends to her wounds.
Smal birds come to feed in the cold of the open riverbank: she watches which trees they fly to, what last foliage, what winter berries, then sets out to col ect whatever food she can find. She discovers, in the mud, a dead sparrow. It is against al custom to eat wild birds but what is custom now but an old and flightless thing? She spears the bird with a sharpened twig and roasts it in a low flame, turning it over and over, knowing at first bite that it wil not be good for her, al rot and age and use- lessness. Stil , in the urgency of hunger, she rips at it with her teeth and runs her tongue along where the heart once beat.
The tiny yel ow beak of the bird sits in the palm of her hand and she tilts it over and drops it into the flames.
She squats over the fire, thankful for her lighter. I must, she thinks, be careful in the use of it. Soon there wil be no more fuel. Smal fires are unseen. Smal fires can be perched above and drawn upwards into the body. Smal fires ignore curfew.
She feels her stomach churn, and, in the late hours, she lies tossing, turning, under Swann's blanket.
She rises dizzy, the sun a bright disc in the trees. A tal os-prey surveys her from a pine tree, his neck curved long and nonchalant, only his eyebal s moving. The branch looks built to him, a perfect blue and gray melding. The osprey turns as if bored, swings its long head to the side, pecks at its feathers, then takes off lazily into the forest.
Moments later it is on the bank, a fish in its beak. Zoli inches silently towards the fire, patiently picks up half a log, flings it. It misses the osprey but the log skitters and bursts into bright embers across the ice. The bird turns to look at her, drops the fish, then lifts its wings and bursts out over the reeds. She hobbles over to retrieve the fish; it is no bigger than the length of her hand.
“You could at least have found me a bigger one,” she says aloud.
The sound of her own voice surprises her, the clarity of it, crisp in the air. She looks quickly about her as if someone might be listening.
“You,” she says, looking around once more. “A big fish would have been more generous. You hear me?”
She chatters to herself as she builds up her fire. She eats the white flesh, licks the bones clean, then plunges her feet in the river once more. One more day and they wil be ready. I can walk and keep walking: long roads, fence lines, pylons. Nothing wil catch me, not even the sound of my own voice.
It had seemed so strange a few days ago, near the roadblock, when Paris leaped into her mind for no reason at al , but now it comes back and she tries the weight of the word upon her tongue.
“Paris.”
She stretches it out, a wide elegant avenue of sound.
The fol owing morning she builds up Swann's boots with the socks, places dry moss at the ankle of each, starts off along the riverbank, watching
for the osprey, expecting it to appear, stately, serene, to do something magnificent—to come down the river on a floe of ice, or to burst from the trees, but nothing stirs.
She finds a length of oak branch with a knobbed end and picks it up, tests it against the ground as a cane. It bends under her tal weight and she shakes the stick in the air.
“Thank you,” she says to the nothingness, then strikes out against the road with her new cane, clouds of white breath leaving her for the morning air.
Paris. An absurdity. How many borders is that? How many watchtowers? How many troopers lined along the barbed wire? How many roadblocks? She tries the word again, and it seems that it arrives in everything around her as the days go by, a Paris in the tree branch, a Paris in the mud of a roadside ditch, a Paris in a sidelong dog that retreats at a half-trot, a Paris in the red of a col ective tractor driven distantly across a field. She clings to its ridiculousness, its simple repetition. She likes the heft of it on her lips and finds that, as she goes along, it is a sound that helps her think of nothing at al , rhythmical y bumping against the air, carrying her forward, a sort of contraband, a repetition so formless, so impossible, so bizarre that it matches her footsteps and Zoli learns exactly when the first of the word wil hit with her heel against the ground, and the last of the word wil hit with her toe, so that she is going, in perfect conjunction, sound and step, onwards.