The first truck to ever give me a lift belonged to a fruit farmer. He wore a black suit. His cheeks were red and newly shaven, his eyes bloodshot.
He knew that I was running from something, but at first he did not say a word. I sat tight in the seat as the gears clanked and the engine rumbled into life. The farmer asked where I was going and when I didn't answer he shrugged and said he was on his way to the market a few towns down the road and I was welcome to join him so long as I did not make a fuss. I feigned being mute once again and the farmer sighed deeply as if it were the oldest trick, which it was, and one that has always failed me, as much as looking over my shoulder.
Scared of something? he asked.
The hedges shot by, trees and windmil s, and I realized just how strange it had been to have walked so far, things being so much different at speed. I stil did not recal how I had walked in the haze after the judgment. I kept that part of my mind blank, I could not face it, how I had crossed the border first from Slovakia and then from Hungary, and then to Austria. Nor did I think of where I was going. Paris seemed as good, or as ridiculous, a place as any.
After a while it began to rain. The windscreen wipers were broken but the farmer had made a rope that he could pul from inside the truck. He showed me how to do it with exaggerated movements and it made me happy, this smal task. I tugged the rope from one side of the dashboard to the other. The fruit farmer complimented me, but I noticed that he had opened his window and was smoking furiously. So he thinks I smel , I thought.
I wanted to laugh. I rol ed down my window and felt the cold wind blowing. We went west in open country under the shadow of the mountains. The road was long and straight and the trees snapped to attention. The mountains lay white and enormous in the distance. It was curious to me that the closer we came to them the further away they seemed to drift. The farmer drove with one hand on the steering wheel and looked across at me every now and then.
You know those Russians put another satel ite up in the air? he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about, nor for what reason he said it.
You can see them at night like smal stars moving, he said.
I made a complicated series of hand gestures and finished by scrunching my fingers down into the palm of my hand, like grinding a tooth that might once have laid there, long ago. The fruit farmer shook his head and sighed. He steered with his knee and lit yet another cigarette. Two streams of pale blue smoke came from his nostrils and then he leaned across and passed the cigarette to me. I shook my head, no, but another voice said take it, Zoli, for crying out loud take it. He shrugged and held the cigarette near the window, and I watched as it reddened and burned down. Sparks flew from his fingers. The smel of tobacco made my head spin. That was one of my first lessons about the West—they do not ask twice. You should always say yes. Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes.
The road sped beneath us. For the first time I began to think I was truly in a different country. I turned to look at a family col ecting blackberries at the side of the road until they became smal dots in the distance. Tal silos gave way to church steeples and, near the outskirts of a large town, the farmer pul ed into the roadside verge. Right, here we are, he said. He climbed out, lifted a tarp and handed me some apples. I've always had a passion for the traveling life, he said. I nodded. Just steer clear of the Kieberer, he said, and you'l be al right.
For whatever reason I forgot my mute ways and asked: What's a Kieberer?
He did not blink an eye and said: The gendarmes.
Oh, thank you, I said.
He laughed long and hard and then said: I thought as much.
I felt my body tighten and I yanked the door handle, but he threw his head back and laughed again.
He drove the truck alongside me as I tried to walk away along the verge of the road. Traffic was zooming past and blaring their horns. To one side was a grazing field, the other a stoneworks. When I quickened my pace the fruit farmer quickened too. He was rol ing tobacco with two hands and steering the truck with his knees, but then he brought the truck to a halt, sealed the paper with his tongue, leaned out the window and gave me two hand-rol ed cigarettes. I took them straightaway.
I'm fond of escape stories, he said.
He clanged through the gears and drove off in a cloud. I stood watching and thought: Wel , here I am in Austria, with two hand-rol ed cigarettes and a man waving me goodbye from a battered fruit truck, if ever I had four guesses of where I would be after so many years, al of them would be wrong.
That night I found some lovely gardens, dense and private, to sleep in. A hard breeze was approaching, announced in advance by the clapping of house shutters. Rain came and I huddled against a wal . I woke to find that I had spent the night beneath a monument to war. Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especial y for the carvers of stone, and I thought about the truth of that, when in every smal vil age of Europe you can see Christ or Soldier hammered out in stone. But who, on a battlefield, chonorroeja, wants a monument? Who, in the middle of his fighting, thinks he wil one day be in the hands of a mason?
I cursed my old poems and went down to the town square— I did not even know what town I was in—and told a series of fortunes for a paltry sum that brought me enough for a train ticket. A shiny train stood on the tracks. Questions rattled in my mind. Where could I go? How could I break a border without a passport? What place might accept me? I tried pushing these thoughts aside. I would buy a ticket west, that was al . I was halfway through the queue at the ticket window when two gendarmes appeared. One lifted my chin with the cold end of his truncheon. He turned and whispered to his col eague. I had a fair idea that they would make their own statue of me, so when the gendarme looked over again, this Gypsy woman was gone once more, on foot.
You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you fol ow the val eys and the rivers. It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that wil guide you along anyway.
My river was the Mürz, clear and leaping. I walked for many days, hugging the bank. On the floodplain there were a few smal huts where I could lie down and sleep for a few hours, sometimes on swales of straw. I watched the circles of a hawk swooping down for food in the tilted grass. I made a canopy above my head with sticks and an old cloth bag to keep out rain and sunshine. When I was forced to move from the riverbank and fol ow the direct line of the road, there were always a few kind drivers who brought me a distance down the val ey. I knew that I was going west by the fal and rise of the sun. Flocks of wild geese flew overhead, and I saw myself as one who lagged behind their formations. In places the road became wide and ambitious with more lanes than I had ever seen before, although, where possible, I stil kept to the smal back-ways or the riverbank. Voices rang out from steepled churches. Laughter and good smel s spil ed from restaurants. In the smal er vil ages, some of the Austrians taunted me—Gyp, thief, Black Pharaoh—though just as many raised their hats in greeting, or sent their children after me with cheese, bread, cake. A boy put me on a scooter and promised to take me around a railway tunnel but he did not, he simply rode his scooter up and down in front of his friends who jeered and taunted. I pretended to put a spel on him and he stopped—they are so fearful, sometimes, of their own invented fears.
Once I passed a burning house in the night with the family outside. I returned and gave to them what little food I had, some bread, some strips of chicken meat. They did not throw the food to the ground as I expected, they just huddled down, prayed, and thanked me, and it struck me then that the world is as varied in goodness as it is in evil.