Her breath wheens fast and uneven. Her lungs, scalded. I must get now to the lake. A quarter kilometer perhaps. To the water edge.
Zoli rol s her shoulders from her overcoat, and drops it on the ground. I wil not fil my pockets with water, no.
Four searchlights tilt and sweep across her. She drops to the soft earth, face in the dirt. The lights stencil the marshland. In the distance the hounds are being held back from the deer and the laughing voices of the soldiers carry through the night. The deer with its bel y split open, surely, the guts steaming on the ground.
Zoli ventures forward again, the bracing cold pul ing at her skin, her heart, her lungs tight.
The merest luck, she thinks, has preserved me.
Slovakia
2003
THE BOTTLES WERE EMPTY, the ashtrays ful. They had cheerfuly slapped his back, sung for him, even fed him the last of their haluski. They had gazed at pictures of his child and posed for their own, by the fire, standing tal and fixed. They had laughed at the sound of their own voices on the tape recorder. He even played it for them in slow mode. They had accepted al his money, except for fifty krowns in a hidden pocket. They'd played him like a harp, he thought, but he was not fazed; he even felt for a while that he had a bit of the Gypsy in himself, that he'd been inducted into their ways, a character in one of their elaborate anecdotes. They led him this way and that about Zoli, and the more krown notes he laid on the table, the more their stories loosened— she was born right here, lam her cousin, she wasn't a singer, she was seen last month in Presov, her caravan was sold to a museum in Brno, she played the guitar, she taught in university, she was killed in the war by the Hlinkas—and he felt like a man who'd been expertly and lengthily duped.
He promised Boshor that he'd come back when he discovered anything more about her, maybe the next week, or the one after, but he knew he'd never return. The young girl, Andela, picked up the china cups from the table and smiled at him as she backed away—she wore his wristwatch high on her arm. He had even, towards the end, watched the cigarette foil being used to languidly clean a gap in Boshor's teeth.
He tapped his pockets. Everything was intact. Car keys, tape recorder, wal et. Boshor shook his hand and grasped his arm in affection, pul ed him close. They almost touched cheeks.
Outside, the shadows lay gray on the settlement. The kids cheered when he pushed open the shack door. Robo was sitting on a cinder block, carving a piece of wood out of which had come the figure of a woman. The whittled chips lay in white patterns at his feet. Robo skimmed off the last bark edge and handed him the statue, leaned in and said: “Don't forget, mister, fifty krowns.” He smiled and put the statue in his pocket: “Just get me to the car.” The other kids pul ed at his jacket sleeve. He leaned down and mussed their hair. He felt happily torn by the desolation; he'd survived it, he was safe, secure, out in one piece. The bands of sweat at his waist and armpits had dried. He had even begun to fret that his car was pointed in the wrong direction, that he would have to reverse it al the way up the dirt road, or execute a three-point turn with al these little kids around.
“This way,” said Robo, “fol ow me.”
He moved through the muck and made signposts in his mind to come back to later, random thoughts, notes to scribble down in a journaclass="underline" The children's clothes are strangely clean. No running water, no taps, no pylons. Electricity is pirated. A girl with eight piercings in her ears. Two huge rubber rings used as jewelry. Not many young men in their twenties or thirties—possibly in prison. Man in bright pink jacket. Chess pieces strung as a windchime. Old woman using broken television as a seat. Immaculate white cloths flapping on the washing line.
He was passing by the last of the shanties when Robo let go of his arm and moved back into the shadows. He felt immediately that he had been dropped.
A bare-chested man. Smal . Barefoot. A bottle scar on one cheek, almost a perfect circle. A tattooed teardrop on the other, beneath his eye. He held the engine of a motor scooter in one hand and his chest was slathered in fingerlines of grease. The journalist turned quickly to look for escape, but the tattooed man took his elbow and pul ed him towards a shack. “Come here, come here.” A curious high tinge to the voice. The tattooed man deepened the grip around the journalist's forearm, and then, as if from nowhere, a young woman in a yel ow dress appeared at his other elbow. She bowed, a smal wren of a thing, her hands folded as if in prayer.
“I'm sorry,” he said, “I have to go.”
He tried backing discreetly away, but the tattooed man was gentle, insistent. The ragged edge of a sackcloth doorway was drawn back. He bumped up against a rough wooden pole. The shack seemed to shake.
“Come on, Uncle, sit down.”
Shapes grew out of the darkness. Three children sat on the bed as if placed there for show.
“I real y must go,” he said.
“You've nothing to worry about, Unc, I just want to show you something.”
The children made room on the pine-pole bed. It was strung with rope. On one end lay a folded white eiderdown and a cushion for a pil ow. When he sat, the ropes sagged and the poles shifted. The tattooed man's hand lay heavy on his shoulder. The journalist looked around. No windows. No carpet.
No wal hangings. Only a row of empty shelves on the far wal .
He turned away and there, swinging from the ceiling, hung a huge zelfya scarf, a hand peeping out of it.
“Food,” said the tattooed man. “We need food for the baby.”
The tattooed man ran a finger along the lip of a little Russian-made fridge, and then swept a lighter around the emptiness. He said something in Romani to the woman. She squeezed up onto the bed. Her smile was wide, though two of her lower teeth were missing. She edged closer, ran her hand along the buttons at the front of her dress, put an arm around the journalist's shoulder. He pul ed back and smiled again, thinly, nervously.
A rat tiptoed across the zinc roof.
The woman opened her top button and then, with a sudden flick of her fingers, reached inside her dress. “Food,” she said. He turned away but she squeezed his shoulder and when he turned back he saw that she had her breast out in her hand, the whole of it, milky at the nipple and striated with sores. Oh, Jesus, he thought, she's turning tricks on me. Right in front of her children. Jesus. Her breast, she's giving me her breast. She held it between her middle fingers and began to keen, incanting something in a low, desperate voice. She squeezed the nipple again. He stood up and his knees gave way. A hand pushed his chest. He thumped back onto the bed. Her breast was stil out and she was pointing to the sores.
The tattooed man reached up to the hanging bundle and raised his voice: “We need food for the baby, the baby is so hungry.” And then, out of the bundle came a tiny bag of bones, wrapped in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.
The child was placed in the journalist's arms. My own baby would cry, he thought. She is so light, so very light. No more than a loaf of bread. A packet of flour.
“She's beautiful,” he said, and he went to put the baby in the woman's lap, but she folded herself against it, curled up tight, put her chin to her chestbone. She moaned, closed the button of her dress, hugged herself, and her moans rose higher.
A fly settled on the child's top lip.
The journalist took one hand from the baby and patted his pockets. “I've nothing with me,” he said. “If I had anything I'd give it to you, I swear, I wish I had, I'l come back tomorrow, I'l bring food, I promise, I wil .”
He swished the fly away from the baby's mouth and watched as the tattooed man slapped his fist into his palm, and he knew for certain now that they were prison tattoos, and he knew what the teardrop meant, and al seemed suddenly cold. A bal of emptiness swel ed in his stomach, and he stuttered: “I'm a friend of Boshor's, you know.”