My grandfather once said, Show me a child of ours who is not happy and I wil show you a gadzo dwarf.
We went down the road, Grandfather and I. My days were spent stil staring backwards, waiting for my dead family to catch up, though of course I knew then that they never would.
We ate from the forest: boiled leaves, pine cones cracked open in a fire, wild garlic grass, and whatever smal animals he ‘d caught in a trap the night before. We could not eat birds, we were not al owed, it was ancient law, but we ate rabbit and hare and hedgehog. We fil ed our canteens from the taps of houses where they welcomed us, or from the fast-running streammelt that came down from the mountains, or from wel s abandoned in the fields. Sometimes we stopped with the settled ones who lived in tin huts and underground hovels. They opened up with great friendliness, but we did not stay, we kept moving on, there was no time for that, Grandfather said we were meant for skies not ceilings.
In the evenings Grandfather sat and read—he was the only person I knew who could read or write or count. He had a precious book I did not know the name of and in truth I did not care, it sounded strange and ridiculous and ful of huge words, nothing like his stories. He said that a good book always needed a listener, and it sent me to sleep quickly—he always read from the same pages, they were heavily thumbed and they even had a tobacco burn in the bottom left corner. It was his only book and he had stitched another cover on, a brown leather one with gold lettering from a catechism to fool anyone who questioned him. I found out years later that it was Das Kapital—the notion stil makes me shiver, though in truth I'm not sure, chonor-roeja, if he ever got a lot of meaning from the pages, they confused him as much as they final y confused others.
Why didn't Mama read? I asked him once.
Because.
But why?
'Cause she didn't want to feel the weight of my hand, he said. Now run along and stop asking me stupid questions.
Later he gathered me up in his arms and I snuggled against his long hair and he said it was tradition, it had always been so, only the elders read, and that one day I would understand. Tradition meant sticking with old ways, he said, but sometimes it meant making new ways too. He sent me off to bed and tucked the blanket around me.
On our slow trip eastward, under the shadow of the mountains, he promised that if I kept quiet he would teach me to read and write, but I must keep it secret, nobody else could know, it would be better that way, it would cause a fuss among those who did not trust books.
He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his shirt where he kept his eyeglasses safe. The glasses were broken, wrapped in bits of wire and tape. The cross frame was held together with a supple twig. I laughed when he put them on.
When he began he did not start with A, B, C, but with a Z, although my other name was Marienka.
We slept under the sky, the weather was fine and the nights were ful and soft, except of course for our yearning for those we ‘d left behind. We had little left to remember them by, but there was an old song my mother had sung: Don't break bread with the baker, he has a dark oven, it opens wide, it opens wide. There were times I would sing it for Grandfather while he sat on the low steps and listened. He closed his eyes and smoked his tobacco and hummed along, and then one day he stopped me cold and asked, What did you say, Zoli? I stepped back. What did you say, child? I sang it again: Don't break bread with the Hlinka, he has a dark oven, it opens wide, it opens wide. You changed the song, he said. I stood there, trembling. Go ahead, sing it again, you'l see. I sang it over and he clapped his hands together, then rol ed the word Hlinka around in his mouth. He repeated the song and then he said: Do the same with the butcher, precious heart. So I did the same with the butcher. Don't chop meat with the Hlinka, he has a sharp knife, it slices deep, it slices deep. He said: Do the same with the farrier. Don't shoe horses with the Hlinka, he has long nails, they'll make you lame, they'll make you lame. I was too young to know what I had done, but a few years later, when we found out what the Hlinkas and Nazis had done with ovens and nails and knives, the song changed for me yet again.
In fact when I see myself now from a distance, when I look back on it al , I was just another girl in a polka-dot dress on the backroads of a country that seemed strange to me at every turn.
Once, a motorcar passed us, and a man in a rich brown overcoat wanted to take a photograph. Grandfather turned his head. This is not the circus, mister. The man held out a few hel ers. Grandfather said: I'd rather skim stones. Then the man took out a crisp note from his wal et and pul ed it tight so that it made the noise of a drumskin, and Grandfather said with a shrug: Wel , why didn't you say so? I was made to stand stil on the steps and I held the flare of my skirt. The man put his head under a black sheet. He looked like a hooded bird. A bulb flashed and I jumped. He did it six times. Grandfather said: Al right, mister, that's enough.
He was quiet when we clopped away again under the trees, but in the next vil age he bought me a peppermint stick. He slapped the whip at Red's rump and said: Don't ever give them something for nothing, Zoli, you hear me?
They documented me when we got to Poprad because al Romani children had to be examined by the age of five and I was already seven. The building was grand and white, with statues outside and a row of gray steps leading up to a huge wooden door. Inside there was a curving staircase, but we were told to go to the smal squat cabins in the back courtyard.
The clerk examined Grandfather's papers for a long time, looked him up and down, from his hair to his boots, and said: Is she yours?
My daughter's daughter, he said.
She's surprisingly tal , you know.
I heard a creak of leather and noticed Grandfather had stretched up on his toes.
She took me into an office, closed the door on my grandfather, turned my face back and forth in her fingers. Your left eye's lazy, she said. She pul ed my head down and checked in my hair for lice and then asked where the bruise came from. What bruise? I said. My hair had begun to grow and my grandfather had sewn a single coin at the fringe, where it bumped against my forehead. She pul ed back the coin, pressed her finger against my forehead. It's ridiculous to have money in your hair, she said. Why do you people insist on such things?
I watched the bob of silver at her neck. She put the cold round metal of it against my chest and listened through tubes.
She shone the flashlight into my throat, put me up against a wal , and mumbled something. She gazed at me and said I was very tal for my age. I was indeed tal , even for seven, but now I had to be five once more.
The clerk said: Five, my holy eye.
She measured my nose and the distance between my eyes, even the length of my hands and wrote it al down careful y. She took my thumb and rol ed it back and forth on a soft pad of black ink and pushed my other fingers down hard onto the page. I liked the little patterns my fingers made, like bootprints down by a river. She asked me lots of questions, where I was born, what was my real name, if I went to school, where were my parents and why weren't they with me. I told her they had fal en beneath the ice but said nothing about the Hlinka guards. She said: What about your brothers and sisters? I said, Them too. She raised her eyebrows, looked at me sternly, and then I blurted: My brother, Anton, tried to break away.
Break away where? she asked. I looked at my fingers. Break away where, young lady? From the lake by the forest. Who in the forest? she asked.
The wolves, I said. Lord above, she said. And what did these wolves look like? I didn't say another word but she said, Oh, you poor thing, and then she touched me on the side of the face with a gentle stroke of her finger.