Go, violin, she thinks, go.
The pulse of the music rises. Under the table, she releases one foot from its shoe. The air feels cool against her toes. She lifts off the second shoe and stretches backwards and feels a light tapping at her shoulder. A voice from behind. Her name. She turns in the chair and fumbles to get the shoes back on her feet. Her name again. She stands. He, the visitor, is fleshy, wiry-haired, mid-forties or so—something about him open and ful , a wide smile on his face. He stretches out his hand, plump and soft.
“David Smolenak,” he says. “From Presov.”
The air around her suddenly compresses.
“I do have the right person, don't I? Zoli Novotna?”
She stares at the row of pens in his waistcoat pocket.
“Are you Zoli Novotna?”
It is the first time she has heard Slovak spoken in many years. It sounds so acutely foreign now, out of place, dredged up. She has, she thinks, been transported elsewhere, her body playing games, her mind tripping her up.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Did I get the wrong person?”
She scans the room and sees the rows of faces at table after table, animated with music. She stammers, shakes her head, then nods, yes and no.
“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”
“I'm here with my daughter,” she says, as if that might account for her whole life.
“It's a pleasure,” he says.
She wonders what pleasure it could possibly be, and feels a flush of heat at her core.
“Presov?” she says, as she catches the edge of the table.
“Would you have a minute, maybe?” he asks. “I'd love to talk to you. I read your book. I found a copy in a secondhand store in Bratislava. It's amazing. I've been to the settlements, Hermanovce, places like that. They're quite a sight.”
“Yes,” she says.
He bal s up his fist, coughs into it, and says: “You're hard to keep track of.”
“Me?”
“I ran into you first when I was reading some articles about other writers, Tatarka, Bondy, Stränsky, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, and it feels to her as if al of the windows have been closed al at once.
“I didn't know you were going to be here,” he says, almost stuttering. “I assumed …” He laughs the sort of laugh designed to fil spaces. “If it wasn't for Stepän, I wouldn't have known anything.”
He lights a cigarette and moves his hand in a coil of blue smoke. Zoli watches the smooth trajectory of the cigarette to his lips, and the movement of his hands in the air, the quick fingers. It is as if the words come out in odd streaks from his mouth—talk of Slovakia, the plight of the Roma, what it means now to European integration, and suddenly he is in Bratislava, he is talking of a towerblock cal ed the Pentagon, graffiti in the stairwel s, dealers in the dark shadows—what sort of dealers? she wonders—and something about an exhibition, about Stränsky's poems being resurrected, a strange word, she thinks, Stränsky would not like it, no, the very thought of him bil owing through the gardens at Budermice, resurrected.
The journalist touches her elbow and she wants to say, No, please leave me alone, leave me be, I am in a garden, I am walking, I am not where you think I am, I am gone, but he is off again on a tangent about a poem, one of her old songs, something about the trunk of a linden tree. He was searching out Stränsky, he says, and discovered Credo, and then a chapbook, they were odd, these poems, rare, beautiful, in a dusty back issue, and when he went searching for the book he was told it could be bought in the secondhand shops, there was a smal cult around it, that she is seen as a voice, a new voice from old times, and he has been looking, searching, digging, and then he says the name again, Stepan, how he helped out when he final y got in touch with him. He crushes the cigarette into a saucer on the table. The smoke rises and she watches it curl. Stepan, the journalist says yet again, and then he mentions something about a photograph taken at the piano of the Carlton Hotel, the clarity of it, the beauty, and she wants more than anything just to lean over and to pour water on the smoldering cigarette, to extinguish it, but the more she watches it the more the smoke rises in stutters.
“Swann?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Stephen Swann?”
“Yes, of course,” he says.
Zoli drags the chair across the carpet, lowers herself into it. She reaches for a glass of water, puts it to her lips. She does not know whose it was, yet she turns it a half-circle and takes a sip. Taboo to drink from someone else's glass, but the water feels immediately cool at the back of her throat.
On the far side of the room a pale face comes forward into the light.
“In the reception,” the journalist says, or seems to say, but his voice feels blown sideways, past her, beyond. It is as if there is a rush of air at her ears, the words make no sense, they are just bits and pieces. The journalist leans forward, earnest and podgy-eyed, his breath stale with cigarette smoke: “I met him today.”
He goes to his knees in front of her, arm on her chair, and she can feel the weight of his other hand on her wrist.
“Ms. Novotna?” he says.
She rises to her feet and there across the room, standing like a silent sadness sunk down, is Stephen Swann, staring back at her.
Zoli thinks a moment that she must be wrong, that her mind has slipped an instant, that she has found his face in someone else, that the mention of his name has brought his face to another, that the dizziness has misled her, that time has just shifted and fractured and landed in shards. The man—is it Swann?— looks directly across at her, one hand down by his side, a wooden cane in the other. He is dressed in a fine gray suit. His hair, or what remains of it, is gray. A shiny bald pate in the middle. Heavy lids frame his eyes. His face is thin, his brow furrowed. He does not move.
Zoli looks about her for some escape. Her breath sounds to her like someone drowning. She casts about for her daughter again, grasps the back of the empty chair. Go away, she thinks. Please go away. Disappear. The music from the stage is loud, powerful, and the extended pul of a bow across a violin makes her shiver.
“If you'l excuse me,” she says to the journalist.
“I was just wondering if we could have a word—" I must go.
“Later perhaps?”
“Yes, yes, later.”
The man across the room—it is Swann, she is sure of it— has begun to move in her direction, stiff and lopsided on the cane. His body moves in the folds of the suit, which creases and uncreases, like some strange gray animal.
“Al of us, we'l get together,” says the journalist.
“Of course, yes.”
“We'l meet here?”
She stands suddenly and faces the journalist, stares into the round outline of his face, and says sharply: “You must excuse me, please.”
From the corner of her eye she watches Swann, his neck a sack of sag, vanishing into the folds of the jacket. She thinks for a moment of curtains disintegrating on a rail. “Don't come here,” she whispers. She pushes the high back of a chair out of her way. Three tables away. “No.” She grabs the cloth of her dress and bundles it in her fingers. “Disappear,” she says quietly. “Leave.” Two tables, and then he is standing in front of her and he says his name, quietly, softly, “Stepän,” as if he is final y and entirely Slovak, as if he always has been, but then he corrects himself, maybe remembering something so old it has been carved from a tomb: “Stephen.”
“I know who you are,” she says.
“Zoli, can we sit?”